Freida Pinto described her new film, "Trishna," as a "very beautiful and yet tragic" tale of a village girl torn between her traditional upbringing and the dreams of a girl from modern India, according to IBN Live.
Pinto became an overnight celebrity after the multiple-Oscar winning 2008 movie "Slumdog Millionaire," where she played Latika. The movie was set in Mumbai, where she was born.
"Trishna" is based on Thomas Hardy's classic "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." British filmmaker Michael Winterbloom set the movie in rural Rajasthan. Pinto will be playing the title role of Trishna, an auto-rickshaw driver's daughter who falls for a rich boy.
"It's quite an intense journey for one girl to go through," Pinto told IANS over phone from New York, where she arrived for the red carpet premiere of the film at the IFC Centre in Manhattan earlier this week.
"I guess the journey is very beautiful and at the same time very tragic," she said, "because it goes from being really innocent to being in a situation of almost desperation and finally to redemption."
She felt Trishna was a tough role to play "because it's so different from what I am in real life," said Pinto, who has a very outspoken personality and "just can't kind of lay back and just get bombarded with things that I don't believe in."
"So I guess that was really hard for me, especially because we didn't really have a solid script," she said. "So every time, I would try to say something or speak out against something, Michael would just say, 'No, you don't say anything in this situation. Just observe'."
"Now as an actor who is very outspoken, it was very tough and again such a welcome challenge," said Pinto, who "would love to be something like that again."
To prepare for her role, she spent some time in Rajasthan's Osian village in a family setting and interviewed a number of girls who worked at hotels and one who worked as ground staff in an airline, according to IBN Live.
"It was very interesting that all the stories were different from the other, but the bottom line came down to 'whatever dad thinks is probably right and we'll just follow that or whatever our future husband thinks is right is going to be our life from then on,'" she said.
"And that for me was the startling reality that I had to just come to terms with to understand my character better," Pinto said.
In an interview with New Jersey Newsroom, when asked how she learned from "Trishna," she said, "Just say no when the time is right. Just don't wait until that time just gets out of your hand... I'm talking about maybe not as horrifyingly mortifying a situation as what she went through. But even in situations like in the film industry, whether it's publicity or whatever it is and you're asked to do certain things and you just don't think it's right for you and that's not something you relate to and you're just not comfortable doing it, instead of beating around the bush, I think the best thing to say is I'm just not going to do it."
"Trishna" was released July 13 in selected theaters in the U.S.