Abhishek Bachchan recalls Amitabh would take adrenaline shots to remain conscious to shoot Sholay and Deewaar
Abhishek Bachchan recalls Amitabh would take adrenaline shots to remain conscious to shoot Sholay and Deewaar
Abhishek Bachchan over an interview recalled how father, Amitabh Bachchan shot Deewaar and Sholay at the same time in different cities.
Deewaar and Sholay were released in the same year.
Notedly, Abhishek Bachchan looked back at the film industry’s transformation in the two-plus decades that he’s been an actor, and saying that he’s envious of the time that his nephew, Agastya Nanda, got to prepare before shooting for his first film, The Archies.
In the midst of the interview, Abhishek said that back in his day, he’d just show up on set and follow the director’s lead and things were even more challenging in his father Amitabh Bachchan’s time.
The actor recalled a story that his father once told him about juggling multiple shoots at the same time, and how he was able to pull it off. Abhishek also recalled that the record for the most shifts in a day was set by Shashi Kapoor, who was juggling 11 different projects at the same time at one point. Subsequently, rules were imposed restricting the number of films one actor could do simultaneously.
He went on to add that he was doing double-shifts early in his career, and was tired one day that he went home early in the morning. Amitabh was having his breakfast, ready to leave. He said, ‘How was it?’ He(Amitabh) said he was very tired. Very casually, he said, that they used to do a lot of this. He was shooting Sholay an hour’s drive from Bengaluru, where the Ramgarh set was erected.They would shoot all day, and he would pack up, take an hour’s drive to Bengaluru airport, take a flight to Mumbai, go straight to Ballard pier, where we were shooting the climax of Deewaar.
He would shoot all night, come back home, take a shot of adrenaline, fly back to Bengaluru the next morning and shoot all day’. He did this for a month.
Abhishek asked his father when he’d sleep, and Amitabh said, “Once you take the adrenaline, you can’t sleep.” He’d nap on the flights amidst the two cities, Abhishek recalled, as he looked back in awe at ‘the kind of work’ actors of his father’s generation did.
While Deewaar was directed by Yash Chopra, Sholay was by Ramesh Sippy. Both films have attainted all-time classic status, and are often cited as the greatest Hindi movies ever made. Both the films saw the light of day released at the peak of Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man era, which he got from Prakash Mehra directorial “Zanjeer”and established him as the biggest movie star in the country after Dilip Kumar and Rajesh Khanna’s run.
News Edit K.V.Raman
