The challenge is to be able to convey emotions with just your voice, says actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who turns narrator for the upcoming documentary Tiger and finds it exciting that her career straddling Hollywood and Bollywood also gives her the opportunity to work in different languages.
The Disneynature documentary for which Chopra Jonas gives the voiceover in English revolves around Ambar, a young tigress raising her cubs in the fabled forests of India. It will start streaming on Disney+ Hotstar on April 22 on Earth Day.
The actor, who has earlier lent her voice for Frozen 2, The Jungle Book, and Planes, said she has always been a big fan of nature documentaries and Tiger presented her with an interesting opportunity to talk about a story coming from India.
"So many hours of incredible filmmaking to be able to capture this family... The fact that it was Disneynature and they're making something on a tiger which is based in India and the story of a tigress and her journey... all of it was just right up my alley. I love doing voice work. I really enjoy doing voice work. I've always enjoyed it. So that was another incentive," Chopra Jonas told PTI in an interview.
She said she relied on her producers and directors to mould her voice to suit the documentary.
"When you're an actor, you're used to the audio-visual medium, and here we are taking away the visual and it's just the audio medium. And I think the challenge really is to be able to convey emotions with just your voice and not do too much. But yet be able to find the right balance."
Her name has come to carry a certain weight, not just in India but on the global stage as well, and the actor said she is just happy to be a part of Hollywood and Bollywood.
"It's been a while that I've been straddling this. Almost 12 years... I've been straddling both industries in both worlds. It's very exciting to me to be able to work in any language and to be able to work in two of the largest film industries in the world. I love my job and I love the medium that I've been given, which is arts and to tell stories and to move people," she said.
Tiger, which comes exactly 15 years after Disneynature's first release Earth, is directed by Mark Linfield, co-directed by Vanessa Berlowitz and Rob Sullivan, and produced by Linfield, Berlowitz and Roy Conli.
The actress said the documentary, which is a culmination of 1,500 days of filming in the jungles of India, is a fun story about the "resilience" of a mother and her four cubs. It also helps one reflect on all the wonderful things that nature has to offer.
"I would love for people to just take a moment and recognise the inner majesty of creation. It's only when we see other forms of creation, besides ourselves, we stop being self-centred. Just looking at the incredible magic of creation helps you pause for a second and really appreciate the gifts that we have around us," she said.
Other than her work as a narrator on Tiger, Chopra Jonas has also been associated with the Oscar-nominated documentary To Kill A Tiger and just announced that she is backing the documentary stories Women Of My Billion (WOMB) and Born Hungry through her production house Purple Pebble Pictures.
"I do enjoy real stories. I get very intrigued by everyday people and human beings around us. And I think with WOMB, and with my other Tiger movie and with 'Born Hungry', there is a theme, I guess. I enjoy documentary filmmaking very much," she added.
