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24 FRAMES PER SECOND A few weeks ago, a Time magazine cover story talked about the trauma of making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a $15 million Chinese action movie. Director Ang Lee and his crew got lost in the Gobi Desert; they shot round the clock with two teams; Lee didn't take a break for eight months; by the end, he thought he would have a stroke. Six months later, he's still trying to recover. I know how hard it is to make a film. I've watched my husband, Vidhu Vinod Chopra struggle through two films. Even the simplest scenes are time-consuming and back-breaking. I remember the Chori Chori song shoot from Kareeb. It was decided that Bobby Deol and Neha would ball-dance in a lake, surrounded by hundreds of floating diyas. To capture the nuances of romance, the shot would be taken during magic hour-those few minutes between sunset and total darkness. Only problem was that the lake in Rewalser, a small town near Shimla, was full of muck, grotesque giant fish and snakes. It also served as the town's cess pool. I remember Bobby screaming as a snake swam close by and then switching seconds later to an expression of pure love as the cameras whirled; Vinod and his cameraman Binod Pradhan shouting themselves hoarse as they tried to capture the fading golden light; assistants from the art department jumping into the filthy water to keep lighting the diyas; and most of all, the cold breeze. It took several days to capture a shot that appeared on screen for perhaps one minute.Mission Kashmir, his new film, has broken even more backs. Again, a lake but this time in Mumbai's Film City. This lake was even dirtier than the Rewalser one. Because, apart from grimy water and garbage floating around, it also served as a loo for most of the unit. But a crew of 250-odd men waded in that water every day for 22 days for the climax shoot. The shoot ended with both Hrithik Roshan and Sanjay Dutt inside the water-Hrithik says the grossest thing was that he could feel the little fish nipping at him. And Dutt, despite repeated baths, couldn't get the smell off. His wife Rhea started sleeping in the next room. Bollywood is full of stories like this. The family massacre sequence in Sholay took over two weeks to shoot because Ramesh Sippy wanted a cloudy look. So his entire unit waited on location near Bangalore for the perfect cloud formation. Sippy and his cameraman, the late Dwarka Divecha, would only film when the skies had a gray sheen-an appropriately depressing backdrop for Gabbar Singh's cruelty. Grapevine has it that Dimple Kapadia's introduction in Saagar was shot some 80 times because Sippy wanted her to look divine. Farah Khan shot the stunningly surreal Tu Hi Tu in Ladakh despite a debilitating bout of diarrhoea. She says, "I thought I was going to die so I better do my best." J. P. Dutta spent agonising months in the Rann of Kutch for Refugee. Cinema is glamourous but it is also hellishly gruelling work. As Richard Corliss writes in Time magazine: "Dying is easy, filmmaking is hard." But perhaps the most incredible thing is that everybody comes back for more. (Anupama Chopra is a Principal Correspondent with INDIA TODAY. She is based in Mumbai. Write to Anupama Chopra)
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