'Everything for the wedding has to be planned perfectly'

Neena Gupta is busy organising daughter Masaba's wedding in November.

"Everything for the wedding has to be planned and executed perfectly," she says. "At the end of the day, it's just me for Masaba. So I can't afford to slip up. Every detail of the wedding is being meticulously planned."

Neena adds that she couldn't have asked for a better son-in-law.

"Madhu Mantena is a good man. He is kind to everyone," she says.

After starring in the horror film Alone, Neena Gupta will be seen as a woman exploring life and marriage in debutant director Pushan Kripalani's The Threshold.

The film resembles her hugely successful play Mera Woh Matlab Nahin Tha with Anupam Kher.

"They both explore the man-woman relationship in the post-60 bracket," Neena agrees. "I am lucky to have got both a play and film where I get to do so much, express so many emotions that women in general empathize with."

Neena is clean-bowled by the response to the play. "When I agreed to do the play with Anupam Kher, I knew I was getting into an interesting territory. But I never knew the response would be so overwhelming. Everywhere in the world women and men are coming up to me to say how much they identify with the play and the interaction between Anupam and me."

The Threshold was a new experience for Neena, she says.

"If you look at my career, there haven't been too many pivotal roles," she says. "Here's a film that has just two main characters, a husband and a wife played by Rajit Kapoor and me. Indian cinema hardly has roles of substance to offer women beyond a certain age. I guess I got lucky."

"We had a writer (Niharika Negi) with us but even then, Rajit and I improvised a lot on the dialogues, mining into our own emotional past to make our characters sound real," she adds.

Photograph: Pradeep Bandekar