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While Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan have worked together in several films, there’s something especially enchanting about their appearances in director Mani Ratnam’s movies. The filmmaker not only knows how to bring out the best in both actors, but their chemistry also reaches its peak under his direction, as seen in Guru (2007) and Raavan (2010).
Recently, Abhishek took a trip down memory lane and recalled an intriguing incident from the making of Guru, where he and Aishwarya — then his girlfriend, now his wife — were caught off guard by Mani Ratnam’s impromptu decision to shoot a song, for which Aishwarya had to stitch a fat suit for Abhishek on set. Mentioning that it happened while shooting in Karnataka’s Badami in the month of May, Abhishek said, during a session at G5A Cinema House’s Mani Ratnam retrospective, “We were staying in a guest house and it was a day off. Mani came and said, ‘Brinda (choreographer Brinda Gopal) is there, go rehearse, we’re doing a song.’ I said, ‘We’re not supposed to be doing a song; we’re shooting Gurukant Desai’s younger portions.’ When I went down, Brinda master was standing there, totally flummoxed. That’s when I realised Mani had thrown one of his googlies.”
Abhishek revealed that the song, “Ek Lo Ek Muft”, composed by AR Rahman and sung by Bappi Lahiri, had only arrived earlier that morning. However, it was just a rough track, without the completed music — a skeletal “click track” for shooting. “For the first two days, we shot the song using the ‘click’ track because he (Rahman) has sent how this guy’s going to be singing,” he shared. Adding to the challenge, the visuals for the song required him to appear significantly heavier than in the scenes that were to be shot during that schedule. “He had previously given me two months to gain weight. That night, I still remember, Ameira (costume designer Ameira Punvani) and Aishwarya made a fat suit for me by stitching kambals (blankets) together. Then they took some shady grey stuff and put it on my hair. He (Mani) was like, ‘shave your head’. I said, ‘But, we are still shooting the younger portions.’ Amid all this, I was performing to a click track.”
Abhishek humorously added that by the time they were ready to shoot the part of the song featuring Aishwarya’s dance sequence, Rahman had finalised and sent the complete track. “Then she started dancing and I was standing there thinking, ‘What is happening?!’” He also shared the intense conditions they endured during the shoot, revealing that Mani Ratnam made him wear the fat suit in 60-degree Celsius heat. “It was summer and we were shooting in stone caves. In that song, you can actually see the rubber from some of the dancers’ shoes melting onto the stones.”
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