‘Aamir Khan and I looked at each other and thought, Oh my god’: Deepak Tijori recalls motorman’s chilling warning before shooting Ghulam train stunt

Deepak said, “For the last part of the shot, the junior artists were not there. There was only Aamir, me, the train motorman and some VFX guys. As per the scene, I trip on the tracks while running. I freeze and this is when Aamir pulls me out. Now we are used to this thing that ‘Gaadi ka driver brake maar dega time pe’. We expected the motorman to do the same. But he told us, ‘Dekho, mere paas aisa brake nahin hota hai. Tum log yeh mat sochna ki main brake maarunga aur gaadi ruk jaayegi. Tum log please distance rakhna. Accident nahin hona chahiye’. Aamir and I look at each other in fear and were like ‘Oh my God’.”

He continued, “We rehearsed a couple of times to understand how much time the train takes to cover a distance. Accordingly, we decided when to move away from the tracks. Yet, we tried to make it as close and nail-biting as possible. It was scary as I was lying on the tracks and Aamir had to pull me. So, everything was depending on him. Thankfully, it went off well.”

Deepak said that ‘there was a frenzy in the theatres’ when the scene came on. “Unfortunately, some people took it too seriously and began emulating it in real life. I heard that some people even died while trying to do the stunt. It led to many people blaming us and asking us to be more careful while showing such stuff on screen,” he said, adding that advisories had to be issued by the film’s team after such incidents.

In a chat with Pooja Bedi, Aamir admitted that he underestimated the stunt’s gravity, and said that in hindsight, he ‘shouldn’t have done it’. The scene was shot from three angles. “Two of those were generated in special effects. But one angle which was my frontal angle, we shot that with the train. At that time, I didn’t realise it but when I later watched it in the editing room then I got scared,” Aamir said.