Safety First? Think Again

Safety First? Think Again • War over Hamlet • Extra Sloppy

Hrithik Roshan, who’s been on cloud nine since fans started raving about the trailer of Krrish 3 earlier this week, hardly looks like someone recovering from an intense surgery. In case you’d forgotten, only a month ago, the actor, in his own words, “had a metal rod drilled into my skull to suck out the blood that was pressing against my brain”. Hrithik describes it like any other procedure, but admits the pain has still not faded. Yet, he’s unusually upbeat and says the only way he could explain the emergency to his two sons was by staying positive.

More than likely, he’ll resume shooting Bang Bang only after the release of Krrish 3 in early November, since recuperating and promoting the superhero movie are his current priorities. When I asked if the surgery had changed his outlook towards performing stunts—given that it was a 30-foot headlong dive into the sea that’s believed to have caused the blood clot in his brain—Hrithik smiled mischievously and said he intends to be “much more careful now”, but also added that he’d still do the ones that “aren’t completely unsafe”.

Another film likely to be displaced from its intended production schedule is the Hamlet adaptation to be directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia that Hrithik has reportedly committed to doing. The filming was originally meant to start in November, but will now happen only after Hrithik wraps up the remaining portions of Bang Bang.

This could well give Vishal Bhardwaj the edge in the race to bring the first Hamlet adaptation to screens. Bhardwaj’s version, reportedly titled Haidar, will star his Kaminey leading man Shahid Kapoor. Although Shahid famously gave Bhardwaj a hard time during the making of that film, industrywallahs say he personally approached the filmmaker for a second chance, vowing to mend his ways. He has also promised to shave his head to play the character, which, if you think about it, is a big commitment from an actor who made a huge fuss about holding an inflated condom while shooting a song with a message on family planning.

Meanwhile I Am director Onir, who has also co-written a Hamlet draft with Black screenwriter Bhavani Iyer, is still gathering finances for the project and talking to actors about possibly starring in it. Onir, you might remember, lashed out at Dhulia some months ago when the latter revealed that he was getting ready to tackle Hamlet. Dhulia dismissed the diminutive director’s complaints, insisting that no one had a monopoly over Shakespeare and that Hamlet was open to multiple interpretations.

The actor who has always maintained that he was keen to play Hamlet someday is Amitabh Bachchan. While Big B did later concede that he was too old to slip into the part now, he was hopeful his son Abhishek might someday land the opportunity that always evaded him.

Given that he has produced a few successful films, is well-travelled and worldly wise, you’d hardly expect this popular star-producer to find himself in the kind of mess he recently landed in when he showed up in Los Angeles to shoot his latest film. It turns out that his producing partner hadn’t so much as even asked around for the rules and formalities of shooting in LA before arriving with a full unit.

The filmmakers discovered that they couldn’t employ extras off the street and pay them a token amount to appear in their film. To use extras in Los Angeles, they had to hire those who were members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and had to pay them wages prescribed by the Guild. Those numbers, apparently, were significantly higher than what our desi producers had budgeted for, and the scenes couldn’t be shot without a significant number of extras.

Left with no other choice, the production reportedly moved overnight to Detroit, where SAG rules and wages didn’t apply and where they could possibly continue to exploit locals by paying them paltry wages. That part of the problem may have been solved, but it meant rewriting several scenes to suit the new locations while also trying to meet shooting deadlines. The director-duo helming the film have apparently been grumbling about the lack of professionalism on the part of their producer pair and all the stress they had to go through on set.

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Rajeev Masand

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