THE PHOREN HANDS

Darby’s presence in Mumbai is good news for the Indian VFX scene. “The talent is there, the resources were lacking, which EyeQube provides. Most of the available local talent is mediocre, but that’s also because they have been working with mediocre props. But once you do away with the excuses by giving them the best equipment and a nice place to work, the work has to be top-notch.” With the dollar under recession, Darby predicts India could attract more VFX assignments.
Darby also finds greater creative freedom here. “Filmmakers are more open to ideas. The main thing I insist on is more control over the productions we work on. If a filmmaker does not want to follow our rules, we cannot guarantee quality. That I have a problem with. Life is too short to produce bad work.” Now, that’s one mantra Bollywood should pick up.

ROB MILLER
SPORTS ACTION
Fame claim: Sport action director for The Final Season, Spiderman 3, All You’ve Got, Rebound, Four Minutes, Miracle
India experience: Chakde! India and Lahore
Rob Miller had spent 20 years directing and choreographing action for film and television and staging world sporting events (1996 and 2002 Olympics) when he came to India in 2006 but that didn’t prepare him for the surprises. Day one of the shoot: the Chakde! girls performed a dance sequence for Miller and his team. “It was very sweet, and let me know that I was ‘not in Kansas anymore’ (to quote Wizard of Oz). That moment, I knew this was going to be a unique project. After having done several movies with men’s sports teams, the cast performing a dance was definitely not something I had seen before,” he says.
He also hadn’t played hockey for two months in the monsoons before.  “We would start warm-up every morning at 6 sharp. It would start pouring about 6.05. And by 6.15, we would be completely soaked, but still having fun. The monsoon just added to the adventure of being in a new culture and location.”  The dedication of the girls, most of them actors and not professional hockey players, impressed Miller, but what bowled him over was lead actor Shah Rukh Khan’s first day at the training camp. “I was both amazed at how nervous everyone was to meet him and how quickly he put everyone at ease,” he says.

KEN METZKER
COLOURIST
Fame claim: Chief colourist, Adlabs; films include Lola, The Whisperers
India experience: Khakhee, Rang De Basanti, Gandhi My Father, Shivaji, Sarkar Raj
His caller tune —Tera bina zindagi se koi from Aandhi—is quite a surprise. “Though I don’t understand every bit of it, I like the tune,” Metzker says. Song and dance was what attracted him to Hindi cinema a decade ago in Vancouver, when he worked as colourist. “I’d return home and aimlessly switch channels from the non-English bouquet. I loved the colours and the dancing in the rains. I was quite surprised when during my first monsoon in Mumbai, I didn’t find anyone dancing in the streets.”
After 10 years in the Canadian film industry, Metzker had come to India for a lark “for six months” after spotting an Internet advertisement by the Prasad Laboratories because “there was no career growth happening back home.” He stayed on for over five years. In November 2004, he married his yoga instructor Komal in traditional Indian pomp, riding an elephant (“a la a Maharajah”) through Mumbai’s busy Powai Road. Now, his citizenship status is ‘a person of Indian origin.’ “Indians are genuinely warm people, unlike Westerners,” he says. In between, Metzker went to Poland too. “But I came back. The mangoes here are so good. Then there is my wife. The third is my favourite dish, tandoori crabs,” he laughs.
A diehard foodie, Metzker uses the imagery of condiments to explain his craft. “For instance, you make spaghetti with tomato. You add pepper, olives, onions and garlic to spice it up. That’s what we do to a film. We spice it up. Give the right colours to a scene, be it the sepia in a flashback, the dark in a horror scene or the mellow tone in a romantic scene…”
From being the lone foreign technician among only eight colourists across India in 2002, Metzker today heads a team of 60 at Adlabs. “When I was leaving for India, my dad said, ‘Are you crazy?’ Today everybody knows that the Indian market is the largest. But you have to have a strong stomach to stay in India. Two foreign colourists I know wanted to stay here but the food didn’t agree,” he says.

ROB MILLER
Miller also didn’t have too many run-ins with Bollywood’s “unprofessionalism”. “Chakde! was a slight departure from the traditional film. Hiring ReelSports and me as the sports action director (which is a fairly specialised niche even in Hollywood) seemed accepted. I had to do little explaining as the film’s director Shimit Amin had already sold our expertise to the Yash Raj studios.” Miller’s commendable choreographing of the ice hockey matches in Miracle (Chakde!’s alleged inspiration) had caught Amin’s attention. Miller justified the decision, going on to win the 2008 Filmfare Award for Best Action.
Not alien to Bollywood, Miller had seen films like Lagaan, Salaam Namaste and Kabul Express before coming to India. “I saw Dhoom 2 and Don in Australia while working on Chakde! and recently saw Om Shanti Om, all of which were entertaining,” he adds. As regards, negotiating the daily life in India, he says, “Other than the Chakde! girls giving me a difficult time for my poor pronunciation of some names, laughing at my Hindi attempts on set, and rickshaw drivers never understanding where I was trying to reach, no major communication goof-ups really happened.” Miller was recently back in Mumbai as consultant for another debut director Sanjay Chauhan’s film Lahore on kickboxing. “Bollywood is an exciting place to be and it’s an exciting time to be in India. I am now a champion for India back home,” he says.

TONY LEUNG HUNG
ACTION DIRECTOR
Fame claim: Action choreographer; films include Mummies, Shadow: Dead Riot, Moscow Heat
India experience: Lahore
Tony Leung’s first day on the sets of Lahore in Hyderabad was eventful. The actor of the day, Mukesh Rishi, sauntered in and was taking his time with hellos when the action choreographer snapped , “What are you doing loitering on the sets without your costume when it’s already your shoot time?”
The reprimand was quite a surprise for the actor not used to such matter-of-fact comments from local technicians. But with Tony around, there was no time to nurse ruffled egos. “The actors were hard-working but their pace was often a bit easy,” says Tony. “As regards the Indian stuntmen, only a few were veterans, but even they weren’t good at martial arts. Their talent, however, suffices for moderate Indian action scenes.”
Leung enjoys a legendary status as one of Asia’s most respected action choreographers and martial artists and started his career with action sequences choreographed by Jackie Chan. I speak to him over the phone somewhere off Shanghai, where he is shooting one of his many action flicks (he’s starred in over 50 and directed five). He is all praise for his first professional Indian outing helmed by debutant director Sanjay Chauhan for Lahore. “Sanjay and his team were very professional and good colleagues. Whoever I met treated my stunt team with respect” he says. The discipline, adaptability and pace of the team were an eye-opener for the director. “Though they cost 15 times the local talent, in just 18 days, they canned more action than what local stuntmen would manage in two months,” says Chauhan.
Leung and his team of 12, including stuntmen, action directors and choreographers and body doubles, trained local stuntmen and actors for two weeks prior to the shoot. The biggest drawback was communication, he says, “Not all would understand English. We mostly communicated in sign language. Anyways, in our craft it’s the body that does all the talking.”