Rohit Shetty recalls how his father took death of Shatrughan Sinha’s body double on film set to heart, became an alcoholic: ‘He took that guilt…’

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In an interview with The Lallantop, Rohit Shetty recalled the fatal accident and said the shot is still there in the film. “There was a lot of crowd when the scene was being shot. The understanding was that my father would tap the camera guy when he started running, and then the blast guy would be tapped, who was also standing there. But in chaos, no one knows how and when, they switched their places.

“When Mansoor started running, my father thought he was tapping the camera guy to start rolling, but he was actually the blast guy. So, the entire godown burst and Mansoor caught fire. He passed away in that. There was chaos on sets, we were kids, the news had reached us by evening.”

The director said a year after Mansoor passed away, his father died as well. “He had taken that guilt. Dad had a very good image among workers, even in the fighter’s association, he would work very hard. But he took this incident to heart. He started drinking a lot. Because he became an alcoholic, work started slipping away from him. He would remain in the house. We knew why he passed away when he did. Kismat (destiny).”

 

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The filmmaker then recalled a stunt in Chennai Express, where a car had to blast and eventually catch a controlled fire. Rohit Shetty shared that his team does remove the petrol tank of cars before executing such stunts.

“But by mistake, when the tank was being removed, some petrol was splashed on the chassis. The car we were using was an imported car which had a reserve tank, which we didn’t know. The shot got over, we filmed it, and went to extinguish the fire. But a spark flew, went behind and the car caught fire. The driver, Shankar Anna, who used to work with my dad, was still inside.

“We panicked and ran. Within a fraction of a second, the car was in flames, and it was upside down, so we couldn’t even get him out. Fortunately, there was a fire brigade on set, so we doused the fire, broke the glass and got him out. His hands were slightly burnt. It was a shocking incident because the same thing had happened with dad many years ago. It triggered that memory and after half an hour, I gathered myself. We took him to a hospital. He is fine now. ”

In the interview, the filmmaker called his mother Ratna a “fighter” and remembered how she brought him and his sister up with severe hardships. There was a struggle, a financial crunch, Rohit Shetty said, but “not a moment of sadness” where they would curse their lives.

“She never even let us feel this way. She worked hard, was into action as well and would be the stunt double of Hema Malini ji during films like Sita aur Geeta… That’s how she met my father as well. If you see the top angle shots of the song Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana from Andaaz, my mother is sitting there because my dad was the action director! In a lot of films when the heroine is falling from stairs, my mother would be that. So, this is our family profession.

“After my father passed away, she resumed work and continued to till I didn’t start working. Our entire family would just work, we never cried over our fate. That same attitude is in me, that if work is there, everything is there. It was a struggle of close to a decade for her. We earlier lived in Santacruz when dad was alive, but after his death, we shifted to Dahisar where my nani would live. We didn’t have money, so I would travel from there to school which was very far. We lived there for many years and when I started working, we shifted. I took over from her struggles then,” Shetty added.

The filmmaker has now made his streaming debut with the Prime Video series Indian Police Force, headlined by Sidharth Malhotra and also starring Vivek Oberoi and Shilpa Shetty, among others.