Nana Patekar recalls getting burnt on sets of Parinda, stabbed during Salaam Bombay: ‘I was in hospital, couldn’t work for one year’

Recalling the scene, Nana told Lallantop, “It was real fire. I was actually burning. After that shoot, I couldn’t do anything for a year. I was hospitalised for 60 days. The scene where you see me trying to escape the fire, I was actually burning. All my skin had peeled off… there was none left. There was no beard, moustache, eyebrow, eyelids left. For six months, I was on complete rest.”

He added, “It wasn’t a risk that I took, it was an accident. How much time does it take you to burn? It hardly takes you five seconds to burn. In those five seconds, everything I mentioned was burnt. In the first take, we put three bucket, in the second we put 14 buckets, so the fire was intense. However, it was an accident, it wasn’t that Vinod (director Vidhu Vinod Chopra) wanted me to burn. It just happened.”

ALSO READ | Rishi Kapoor would abuse a lot on sets, refused to give more than one take; Nana Patekar recalls clashes: ‘We are not like you theatre guys’

On Parinda’S 30th anniversary in 2019, Vidhu Vinod Chopra had also recalled shooting the iconic scene. He said, “Nana refused to wear fire suit, I was like if you won’t wear the suit, I will not shoot it. So he wore the shirt, then I asked him to wear the bottom, he was like ‘I won’t in front of you’, so I left the room, but he didn’t wear it. And then during the shoot, he got burnt.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films (@vidhuvinodchoprafilms)

Speaking of more such accidents, Nana recalled getting stabbed for real in Meera Nair’s Salaam Bombay. Nana recalled that while everybody loved the shot, nobody realised he was actually stabbed. “You remember a scene where this guy comes and stabs me? For that scene they had tied a tire around my waist, but with the force that the boy stabbed me, the knife actually stabbed me and I was bleeding. They thought, ‘Kya acting ki hai’. These sort of accidents keeps happening.”

In the same conversation, the 74-year-old actor also revealed how the end scene of Krantiveer wasn’t written at all. “I just said it, the whole dialogue. Now, if you will ask me, I will not remember a single word I blurted out that day.” The scene which now has a cult following was impromptu, said the actor.

“I was in the hospital. The next day, we were supposed to shoot. I thought if I will die today, my producer and director will die tomorrow. So I decided to get done with the shoot. I took a few cardiogram of me, I thought I was okay, but the doctor was adamant on me resting for a couple of days, while Mehul Kumar had everything ready on set. He is a good man, he said it’s okay if we have to incur losses for these two days, you please rest and we will shoot after that. I had chest pain for which I had to be admitted to the hospital.”

“The climax was scheduled for 6 days. I reached there with my doctor, and my friend Ashok who always took care of me. When I reached, they told me we will write the scene. I was like, ‘what do you mean you will write?’, then they narrated to me how they wanted the scene to be, I heard and then I was like let’s have a lunch break. We will start at 2:30 pm. I said set up at least five cameras and add extra magazines in all. So that one camera is always on, we should have multiple angles. We started at 2:30 pm and we ended the shoot at 5 pm. After I finished my monologue, I didn’t know what to do, so I did all that drama, ‘Phaasi pehna chal’ because I didn’t know what more to say, and it was over. Now a lot of people imitate my scene, but I won’t be able to do it myself anymore”, added Nana.

On the work front, Nana last appeared in the film The Vaccine War. Now, he is gearing up for Anil Sharma’s Journey, among other films.