Hollywood film with Bollywood masala

Bollywood star Salman Khan will play the romantic lead along with a Hollywood actress, who is still to be finalised, in the nearly $10 million film to be shot in English and Hindi from February next year.

Bollywood has been the flavour of the month in the West since one of its blockbusters, Lagaan, won the country its third Oscar nomination and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lavish stage musical, Bombay Dreams, wowed audiences in London.

Carroll, who made Playing By Heart with Sean Connery and Angelina Jolie, said Marigold would have half-a-dozen songs like any other Bollywood film.

Marigold is the story of a spoilt and demanding Hollywood actress who finds herself stranded and penniless in India. Unable to return home, she takes up a role in what the filmmaker calls a ‘‘gaudy’’ Bollywood production, Pyar Bina Kya Zindagi.

Khan plays a stylish choreographer who teaches Marigold, the actress, to shake a leg in the film which will mostly be shot in Bombay, beaches of Goa, Agra and Rajasthan’s sand dunes.

‘‘The movie within a movie format enables us to do Bollywood sequences for real and at full strength, while still preserving the narrative structure of mainstream Hollywood entertainment,’’ Carroll said. He added American audiences would be able to identify with the movie. (Reuters)