Bollywood and Beyond: A Century of Indian Cinema

Indian cinema is now over 100 years old.

And from humble beginnings, it's gone on to become the largest,

most diverse film industry in the world.

Reflecting the hopes and dreams of a nation.

That's what's probably unique about Indian cinema.

That...it has hope in it.

Who?

You.

We rely heavily on emotions. We're an emotional country.

That's what our nation relies on. Our hope is based on emotions.

I love cinema, I've always loved cinema,

and for me cinema is the greatest art.

And Indian cinema, I think, is particularly unique.

MAN: How disgusting!

-ALL:

-How disgusting.

In this film I'll see the hopefuls and the people who train them.

And hunt down some of the biggest stars in the industry.

My journey will take me across India

and lead me all the way back to London.

Now, in the time that we have, this is a bit of a whistle-stop tour

through the films that I think define Indian film

and also what makes it unique.

If you haven't seen a Bollywood film before, they're known for

their song and dance routines and spectacular action.

Rathore. Vikram Rathore.

But now a new wave of art house films

and independent hits have made India a serious global player,

and business is booming.

I see this business going through an exponential shift

over the next few years.

This really is a golden age of Indian cinema.

Don't angry me.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Thank you.

My experience of going to the cinema in the '60s was with my parents,

with my family, on a Friday, Saturday or a Sunday,

our family, and 40,000 others, which means about three Indian families,

all descended on these three cinemas in the centre of Southall.

And there were queues...

I should explain that in a queue, I guess in the West,

means an ordered line of people...

..just chatting and looking at their watches waiting to go in.

A queue in Indian terms means, "Let's go!"

And everybody is one little aperture, it's like a funnel,

and everyone just pressing in, and that's what it was like.

We would get in, we would get our seats

and there would be laps on laps on laps.

Health and safety didn't exist at that point.

It was just, pack as many people as you can into the cinema hall.

And the reason why people like me

and families, and particularly kids, kept on going back was that

Hindi movies for us was the closest we got to a cultural injection

from the land of our ancestors.

If you want to get under the skin of the Indian film industry

you have to start here in Mumbai,

the home of Bollywood cinema.

Every time I visit I'm surprised by the sheer pace of change.

Elaborate towers reach ever higher

and this city more than any other projects India's global ambition.

And even after all these years,

the city is still clearly obsessed my movies,

their stars and fairy-tale lifestyles.

They don't call it the City of Dreams for nothing.

You don't have to look hard for examples

of how devoted Indians are to cinema.

Take the Big B for instance. Amitabh Bachchan,

affectionately known as the Big B,

is without doubt the biggest movie star on Earth.

It's a position he's enjoyed for nearly four decades

and demonstrates more clearly than anything

the amazing power that cinema has in India.

I'm making my way across town to the starry Mumbai suburb of Juhu,

where the great man lives.

We've heard that on Sundays

when he's in town, there's always a crowd outside his house,

but on Sundays he comes out and gives little...

people blessings to the fans.

We're outside Amitabh Bachchan's gate.

Now, as you can see, I'm not the only person who knows that

he's going to be here.

Hundreds of people have made the pilgrimage to Amitabh's house.

TRANSLATION: We've been standing here for three hours.

Braving temperatures in excess of 40 degrees

in the hope of a glimpse of their idol.

Some of them have come literally from thousands of miles away,

all over India, to come over here to catch a glimpse of him.

I mean, this is kind of...demigod worship exemplified.

We've been here about half an hour now

and the crowd's really built up.

It must have been like this outside Graceland.

I can't think of anywhere else that

people would gather outside this sort of way.

And there for just a few seconds is the man himself.

It would be impossible to believe that none of us have had failure

in our lives and that all of us have had continued success all our lives.

It's difficult to comprehend the level of devotion

that Indians bestow upon stars like the Big B.

But thankfully Anupama Chopra,

an industry insider with her own movie review show,

has agreed to give me a window into this crazy world.

Why in India are the movie stars so worshipped?

You know, I had in fact done a long feature for The New York Times

on exactly this. The sort of devotion and the praise

and, you know, some guy walking from somewhere in Utter Pradesh to

Bombay because that is a form of penance that God make him, OK.

Where do you see this? It's impossible.

I don't think Brad Pitt has this. I don't think Tom Cruise has this.

It's just these people.

And so I try to explore exactly this, that

what makes us so crazy about movie stars?

And one hypothesis is that the early films were all mythologicals

and costume dramas and many of them were about religious subjects

where you literally saw stars as gods.

And those were the first few years of Hindi cinema.

To get to the bottom of how Indian movie stars reached their

present day demigod status, we need to start 100 years ago

in the silent era.

Raja Harishchandra, made in 1913, is thought to be the first

Indian movie and was a tale of gods and goddesses,

which established the format for the new medium.

But little has survived to the present day.

And so the best place to start is the National Film Archive in Pune.

Here a small but dedicated group of archivists struggle to

preserve the few surviving examples of early Indian cinema.

The founder of the archive, PK Nair,

recalls the romance to early visits to the cinema.

I watched the movie inside the cinema hall by sitting on the floor.

Floor means it's filled with sand, white sand from the beach.

And the chai wallah and the others

used to come every ten minutes

because the interval was there, it was single projector.

So there used to be a number of intervals.

So they used to come every now and then

and offer you tea or coffee or whatever it is.

Because early negatives and prints contain silver,

many were stripped of their precious metal and lost for ever.

Then in 2003 a fire at the National Archive tragically wiped out

many of the prints that PK Nair had painstakingly collected.

One precious survivor is the 1943 film Kismet.

It's the story of a pickpocket who falls in love.

And in its day proved a massive hit,

giving India its first superstar, Ashok Kumar.

For the first time movie stars were calling the shots.

The first company of note at that time was a company called

Bombay Talkies.

And this was formed primarily by two people,

Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani,

who were both stars of the screen at that time.

So in a way the closest equivalent I guess in America would be

United Artists.

And these guys would be like Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin

and people like that.

Actors who had formed their own studio.

The early talkies were more than just popular entertainment.

In the run up to Indian independence, films like Kismet

sent a very clear message.

While India was still under British rule there were censorship

restrictions on what can be filmed and what can be said on screen.

But clever film-makers could see the enormous appeal of the new medium

and found neat ways around the censor.

They told censors at that time, "This is a war film.

"It promoted the effort for the war."

So that is why they got this exemption.

So they managed to put in an anti-British song

-in effect paid for by the British?

-Yeah.

That's quite clever, isn't it?

Whilst on the surface the protest songs in Kismet

were aimed at the Japanese invader,

the spirit of resistance they represent was aimed directly

at India's colonial masters.

The audience knew it was meant for the British.

That is the greatness of the film.

So it seems that from the very beginning, songs which appealed to

the common man played a central role in Indian cinema.

What is the purpose of the song, the musical number in Hindi film?

Songs have always been the part of a dramatic narrative.

This has been millennium old tradition in our country.

And that is what the cinema inherited.

The very first talkie that we made was Alam Ara.

It had, fasten your seatbelt, 50 songs.

-50?!

-Yes. 5-0.

But the song used to be two minutes long.

But it had 50 songs.

So there was never any confusion that whether we will have songs

or we won't have songs.

Simple lyrics loaded with a nationalist pride of a new republic

was a sure way of capturing the public's imagination,

and film-makers who chose the right songs

could ensure their movies became hits.

Raj Kapoor had a very canny ear for picking a good song

and a catchy song.

Like the one from Shree 420 - Mera Joota Hai Japani.

The kind of films he made, I don't think anyone can do that today.

Why is that?

I think because they were so simple.

And now suddenly everything is like snazzy,

there's computer graphics, songs, there's expensive costumes,

lavish sets.

Whereas back in the day when films like Boot Polish and Awara,

even Bobby for that matter,

simple love story that just stormed the nation.

A simple storyline with basic technique of shooting.

Raj Kapoor was one of the brightest stars

of the newly independent India.

In Shree 420, which he also produced and directed,

he plays the lead character.

With more than a passing resemblance to Chaplin's Little Tramp,

he proved hugely popular

and the film remains influential to this day.

Before starting any film of mine...

and now even today...

I see his one film Shree 420.

I've seen that film more than 200 times.

Because that film made in '50s or '60s, is today's film.

Now, the interesting thing about Raj Kapoor as a film-maker is that

what he did was he made populist film,

he made films that had social messages,

but as a creator of film he got to understand

what every department on a film does.

He understood the process like no other film-maker.

Raj Kapoor was amongst the first stars to establish their own studio.

In the process, began a dynasty that still rules the industry.

One of his granddaughters, Kareena,

is amongst India's most popular stars today.

I was wondering, when you were a kid,

at what point did you become aware that you were part of this dynasty?

Well, I don't know. I don't think I was aware as such

because I think everyone in the family for us

it was like, it's a job, a passion that has become a job.

So no-one really took success or being movie stars

or big directors or producers or actors very seriously.

It was just something that we loved doing.

That was always the atmosphere that was around.

And, for me, I don't think I ever thought of anything else

apart from just becoming a movie star.

I think that while I was in my mother's stomach

I think I was ready to dance and sing

and just kind of take off into the Indian film industry.

It's in my DNA.

In India we still have joint families here.

Like, my son stays with me.

There is more closeness,

so I feel that that is a strength of the family.

To be close and work together.

We Indians are made in that manner.

Kapoor's leading lady, Nargis,

would also go on to become movie royalty,

and the role which would propel her into cinema history

was her portrayal of the iconic Indian mother

in one of the most influential Indian films of all time -

Mother India.

It's an incredibly moving film about a young widow

who struggles to bring up her two children,

finding hope in the face of abject poverty.

Mother India the film,

I don't remember how many times I've seen it in my school days.

And the character Birju left a very deep impact on me, and the mother.

Mother traditionally has been respected,

worshipped in our society.

Mother is a god.

You can't say that, "Once upon a time there was a bad god."

So you can't say that, "Once upon a time there was a bad mother."

So if you are praising the mother, admiring her, worshipping her,

nobody can question you.

So that is a totally bankable character, as a matter of fact.

You can put your last shirt on it.

Mother India, I would say, is a very beautiful performance,

but Mother India started this image of suffering women

because they were constantly looking out for the family

and sacrificing themselves for the family.

They were the suffering wife,

the all-forgiving mother,

the sacrificing sister

and what have you.

The decision-making roles always went to the man.

If not the hero, then the villain.

He was the more powerful of the lot. Women were the good person.

We didn't live as an individual.

Modernity is about the individual.

And they never put themselves before the family or the community.

It wasn't until the 1950s that women started to become represented

in a more sophisticated way, with the rise of what became known as

parallel cinema or what we might call art house.

It was with the advent of parallel cinema that you started seeing

women in greater complexity and maybe having shades of grey

and certainly having a more independent voice.

The '50s gave rise to the film-maker.

So we had people who were cinema literate

who were making films in India.

These were kind of film-makers who were very aware and influenced

by films from around the world and particularly from the West.

So we had people like Guru Dutt, who made classic films like Pyaasa

and Kaagaz Ke Phool.

And he was influenced by people like Orson Welles,

and you can see it in his framing.

The godfathers of Indian parallel cinema, auteurs like Guru Dutt,

were convinced that cinema has a power

that goes far beyond mere entertainment.

Despite a tragically short life and career,

Guru Dutt left an enduring legacy.

These are the people who have proved beyond any doubt

that it was possible to make an extremely aesthetic, nice, sensible,

intelligent film which can do great box office.

They have done it again and again.

Pyaasa was a very big hit.

Pyaasa, or "thirst", is the tragic tale of the life and loves

of a struggling poet.

Guru Dutt stars and directs in a film that is thought to be

at least partly based on his own experiences.

And it's so beautifully made that it is commonly regarded

as one of the greatest films of all time.

He could talk through visuals.

If you watch Guru Dutt's films, you can see the film was possible

only with this kind of visual.

Pyaasa, the script,

could have fallen flat on its face with an inferior director.

Another leading light of parallel cinema was Satyajit Ray.

And in Apur Sansar, he launched the career of Sharmila Tagore,

then just 13 years old.

The first day's shooting was Apu gets married.

He goes to this village and his friend takes him

and he somehow has to marry this girl and he brings her back.

And Apu and Aparna, that's my character,

are waiting outside.

And then Ray's voice rang out.

He said, "Start sound. Camera. Action."

And Soumitra opens the door and walks in

and looks at me and says, "Come in."

Means come in.

And I cross the threshold,

walk in and then he tells me, "Walk forward."

I look up, "Look towards your right, raise your shoulder, sigh.

"Cut. Excellent. Next shot."

And then very soon after that we did that shot that everybody raves about

when I go to the window.

And overwhelmed with everything that's happened, I start crying

and then there is a child and the mother playing downstairs.

So I look through a torn curtain.

Everybody has raved about that shot.

Apparently it's the perfect framing,

and it's like Mona Lisa, from whichever angle you see that.

The World Of Apu would go on to become a hugely influential trilogy

and gave Satyajit Ray his rightful place in

the firmament of world cinema.

But this low-key realist cinema was a far cry from what

Indian cinemagoers were accustomed to.

At that time, acting was very theatrical.

I mean, usually what we saw, it was a bit OTT.

He wanted to actually use the medium because he was hugely influenced by

the European directors and Hollywood, so he had a different concept.

And he created a bridge between his beloved Bengal

and the rest of the world,

but didn't reach out to the other parts of India.

It's interesting because Satyajit Ray

was never as popular within India as he was outside of India.

And I wonder if that's to do with the fact that his films were

social realism, they didn't have songs in them,

he wasn't pandering to the masses at that point.

Ray's sophisticated aesthetic came at a high price.

By rejecting song and dance, he'd broken one of the cardinal

rules of Indian cinema.

Then sound came into cinema.

We used to have 16 songs in each film,

20 songs in each film,

and our films were all musicals, like they were in the West.

But we never came out of the musicals, we just stayed with that.

And so for us, a film is not a musical because there's songs in it

-because that's like a normal film for us.

-Right.

So, actually, when I look at Hindi cinema or Indian cinema

and it's not just Hindi, it's Tamil, Telugu, everywhere...

it's a bit like Broadway.

Our films are like West End or Broadway musicals.

-If you know what I'm trying to say.

-Yeah.

So it's not odd to us as an audience when people break into a song.

Will you reject Italian opera because everybody is singing?

You have kabuki in Japan.

Would you condemn kabuki because, "Oh, it's not real.

"Nobody moves or walks and talks like this."

Would you say that? No.

What people know us by also is the song and dance because when you

go to Hollywood or when you talk to an English actor, when you say

you're from the Indian movies, the first thing,

and they have a beautiful smile on their face, is, "Wow!

"The songs and the dances." Because that's what we are.

So we shouldn't try to be something that we're not.

We should be proud of what we are.

I'll tell you one thing I said in the Birmingham Film Festival.

I said, "I just saw Godfather last night."

I said, "What a stupid film.

"It's dumb. It's so boring."

There was silence.

I said, "Nobody was singing."

And all the Asians started clapping.

You know what? We sing. That is our culture.

Therefore, for me, it's...

I have grown up, my mother sang songs on my birthday,

we sing songs in marriages, we sing songs in death,

we sing songs when we do whatever.

So that is how we grew up.

That's our culture. Music is really part of our culture.

And therefore our cinema,

which is meant to entertain us, has to have that.

Do you know, you got me thinking about the Godfather.

I just think the big musical numbers are,

"I made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

-Yeah.

-"Sleeps with the fishes."

-Absolutely.

Now, on film you want the best-looking guy

with the best voice doing the best dialogue.

When you want to hear a song, you want a guy or a girl

with the best singing voice.

Now, obviously the two always don't go together.

And that's where the rise of the playback singer came in.

Songs were so important that audiences were able to completely

overlook and forgive the fact that their hero was not singing the song.

Because the songs were that good and the songs were that important.

And the kind of singers that emerged at that point then dominated

the industry for the next 40 years.

You had singers like Mohammed Rafi.

You had singers like Kishore Kumar.

Lata Mangeshkar.

Mukesh.

And Asha Bhosle.

ASHA BHOSLE SINGS O MERE SONA RE

It was playback singers like Asha

who from the very earliest days

helped transform mere actors into silver screen deities.

1947 I started my career in Hindi film.

You know, at that time the equipment was very poor. One track machine.

I sang one track machine with all musicians,

one mic, and I'm singing, then duck, then flute.

Flute's playing and then they're playing.

After that I sang in Bombay, Mohan Studio.

The studio is full of musicians,

no place, so I sang outside studio.

The one tree, they put mic on that tree,

big mic, so big and I'm singing.

Asha-ji has the most recorded voice in history.

More than 12,000 songs in a career lasting more than 60 years,

and she's still going strong.

Fantastic.

Isn't she amazing? She's over 80 and she sings like that.

And she was holding back, we were sitting down in a room.

Asha Bhosle's fame was still rising as the '60s arrived.

But styles had changed

and Indian cinema was moving in step with the times.

This was also the era of Shammi Kapoor.

Another member of the burgeoning Kapoor dynasty.

While his brother Raj played the lovable everyman,

Shammi made his name as a thoroughly modern playboy.

Hindi cinema had always borrowed freely from the West,

and in one of my favourite movies,

the murder mystery Teesri Manzil, Bollywood embraced rock and roll.

For classically trained musicians like Asha Bhosle,

the new style proved a challenge.

SHE SINGS

-That was a very difficult song.

-Why was that difficult?

Because that...

-That's very difficult to sing.

-How did you prepare for that?

First he came to me, "Can you sing?" I said, "Yes, why not?

"I am a singer."

He played song.

It was very difficult. I can't sing this.

And I said, "OK, I will try."

I can't say no.

I'm very stubborn too. I have to sing this.

So 15 days I practised that...

-Like that harm...

-Harmonica.

-Harmonica.

-Yeah.

Like that.

SONG: Aaja Aaja

So the 1960s, this is where I come in,

in person because I was born,

which made it easier to go to the cinema.

And at that time, from memory, Southall had three cinemas.

There was the Dominion, Century and Liberty.

Those were the cinemas that just showed Hindi films all the time.

It was a fantastic communal experience,

we were all in it together.

And people were singing along with the songs,

people would applaud the hero.

It was kind of pantomimic in its way, but it was just people

getting involved, and that was kind of lovely cos everyone was doing it.

And the trick at that time was for the men, particularly,

to guess where the intermission was going to come in

and then run out to get to the samosa

and tea stall, behind which was one very old,

very asthmatic lady,

who was dealing with a queue of about 3,000 people.

It would be somebody going, "Give me 18 teas. 35 samosas."

And she was...

HE COUGHS

These were those plastic cups

that as soon as you put hot water in it, they deformed.

Those are the things that you had to carry,

plus the bag of samosas as well.

So I discovered at that point that there is a very specific

Indian male sound for pain in public.

And that is...

Wee!

Wee!

For half the people, they would come back and the film had started.

So they were coming back into darkness.

They had no idea where their families were.

And I don't think this is a racist thing to say, but in the dark...

..Indian families kind of all do look and sound the same.

And they would come in and they've got samosas in one hand

and they would look around, come into darkness

and not know where they are.

And all they could think of saying was that very original,

"Where are you?"

To which someone would say, "Here."

And they'd go, "OK. Here."

And once there was a bright scene or something lit up, they'd go,

"You're not my family!"

There was one film more than any other

that defines my childhood experience of Indian movies.

Seeing the cinema of the world, Magnificent Seven, Mackenna's Gold

and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

and all these kind of films.

And there are all these...stereophonic sound,

all this was big stuff, and why can't we do it?

For me and my generation, it was the equivalent of Star Wars.

It was the Star Wars for my generation.

I saw it in India.

I then came back to Southall where it was on all three cinemas

all the time for about three months.

And because we had to go to the cinema every week,

I saw it every week for three months.

So we all sat down, Salim-Javed, writers, myself, my father

and we all sat down and decided, let's do something big.

When it was being made, cos it took that long to make,

the film industry had started sniggering about it.

They had started laughing and making little jokes and,

"Ah, Ramesh is still making Sholay."

Sholay is the story of two small- time crooks who are hired to help

save a village from ruthless bandits.

It's a Western buddy movie, Indian style.

GUNSHOT

Salim-Javed wrote that incredible script,

copying pieces from many other films.

But what they did is they took bits and pieces here and there

and put it together in this way that had never been seen before.

It then replicated itself by us kind of recreating scenes...

This is slightly embarrassing.

This is something like a counselling session.

Recreating scenes of it in the playground or at people's houses.

We would get together and go, "Which one are you going to be?"

Inevitably they said, "You have to be Dharmendra

"cos I'm taller than you."

And you kind of go, "Yes, but I've got the voice."

And in particular I remember, with some embarrassment now,

try and replicate one song.

SONG: Yeh Dosti

APPLAUSE

The number of bicycles I fell off trying to do that.

And you know what? This is true.

If you couldn't find a bicycle, you got a skateboard

and you'd try to do that.

And if you couldn't find a skateboard or a bicycle,

cos obviously we were too young to ride scooters and motorcycles,

you just got a little kid and you jumped on his back and you said,

"You have to be the motorcycle."

Sholay really did change the game.

Crucially the songs weren't just decorative,

they provided a narrative function.

But critics had roundly dismissed the movie

even before shooting was complete.

People started saying, "What happened with this?

"We don't know what Ramesh is doing."

"What's he doing?"

Yeah. "He's in Bangalore in some rocks making what? Who knows?"

And they've been just shooting this movie and shooting this movie.

A trade magazine, instead of waiting till the picture was released

on Friday, brought out a special issue -

"Why Sholay has flopped."

-Oh.

-The whole issue discussed

why such a big film has flopped so badly.

And obviously it was an extremely credible trade paper,

so everybody believed it.

Wherever we went people used to tell us that the basic idea was wrong.

This could not have run and why.

They would give us ten reasons that why this picture

could not be a successful film.

What were the kind of reasons they gave you?

What was their reasoning to say this will flop?

What is the lady's interest in the picture?

It's too white and too masculine.

The premiere itself was fairly kind of divided audience.

I think maybe Raj Kapoor or someone else said that,

"What is the friendship in this?

"One friend is saying bad things about the other friend.

"There's too much violence.

"You start with the train sequence."

-And people actually called it Cholay.

-Right.

And they said it was a flop, it's a disaster.

-Cholay meaning chickpeas.

-Meaning chickpeas.

"Cholay. It's nothing."

In the first week, in those same very trade papers,

we gave a page, Salim and me,

that we, Salim-Javed, writers of Sholay, guarantee that this picture

will do more than one crore in every territory.

Crore was a fantasy that time. No film had done one crore.

So we had become a laughing stock.

It wasn't until the film went on national release that the

true audience reaction started to make itself felt.

An exhibitor called me and he said, "I have to tell you one thing.

"At interval these guys don't come out,

"they don't have any Cokes or any of my snacks,

"samosas and things like that."

This is really rubbing it in. He's calling me to say,

"Forget the ticket sales, my refreshments are not being sold."

But he said, "Do you know why?

"That's because nobody wants to get up from their seats."

They had never seen a film like this before.

That's an incredibly confident thing to do, to take out your own ad...

But then we too were proved wrong because it did four,

five time more than one crore.

And when you see it in the theatre,

we were a privileged family

living in Bhopal,

and there wasn't much to do apart from

play cricket or shoot things.

So one of the people working for us said,

"Why don't you come and see a movie?"

And it was a single screen, there were no multiplexes,

and we sat there with the masses.

And everyone was highly entertained.

So there's something collective about that kind of audience

that basically poor people looking up at the screen and Mr Bachchan

was entertaining them with songs and dialogue and action.

Sholay's enormous success established beyond any question the

career of a man who would dominate the industry for decades to come.

Through the '50s and at least some of the '60s,

it was a very hopeful nation.

Independence had just happened.

You believed things would be good and things would be right

and there was this whole Nehruvian Socialism and hope.

There was a lot of hope.

But by the '70s, that hope had been completely dashed to the ground.

This gave rise to a character that became known as the angry young man.

And in a way, I suppose, it was a kind of rebel

but with lots of hidden causes.

So for this new character that was going to be more meaningful

to the Indian public, they needed a new kind of hero.

The pretty boy romantic heroes of the '60s just wouldn't cut it.

They needed someone who had the physical kind of athleticism

and charisma of a Clint Eastwood.

They needed somebody who had the voice of a Richard Burton.

They needed someone who had the smouldering appeal

of a Marlon Brando.

And the acting chops of a Robert De Niro.

Cue Amitabh Bachchan.

Amitabh Bachchan was more than a movie idol.

He was someone the man in the street felt they knew and could relate to.

A truly working class hero.

You had this man who was not traditionally handsome.

I always said that he looked like somebody who had a bruised soul.

-Right.

-He had been hurt by something, someone,

by just an indifferent society.

His next film, Deewaar,

tells the story of two brothers fighting over their mother's love.

When the boys grow up, one becomes a policeman

and the other becomes the biggest gangster in town.

The confrontation between them

is one of the most famous scenes in all of Indian cinema.

Shashi Kapoor is standing there.

Shashi was the policeman.

He is an outlaw. And he comes in a car. He's a big man now, rich man.

And he says thank you when he looks at him that he is in plain clothes.

HE REPEATS LINE

That's the beginning.

-Mm-hm.

-That both of them have taunted each other.

HE REPEATS LINE

Now when you were writing that, what were you feeling?

Did you feel the same...?

As I said, I get goose bumps when I remember it now.

One night I was not able to sleep, so I thought,

"OK, since I'm not able to sleep, let me try that scene."

And I wrote it in one go.

That's all. No line was added, no line was cut.

Those trailblazing films of the early '70s established

a recipe for mainstream Indian movies that would hold for decades.

And even today,

movie hopefuls are expected to master those same ingredients.

In Dharavi, one of Asia's largest shanty towns,

I've been told there's an acting school that has helped launch

the careers of several actors,

including kids featured in Slumdog Millionaire.

And they start young.

MUSIC PLAYS

On Saturday mornings, these kids are taught

everything from the latest dance moves to basic fight sequences.

THEY TALK IN OWN LANGUAGE

No!

I decided to eavesdrop on one of Baburao's classes

where the students are drilled in the highly emotional

kind of acting for which Bollywood has become famous.

THEY WAIL

THEY SOB

-How disgusting! ALL:

-How disgusting!

-How disgusting! ALL:

-How disgusting!

The teacher, Baburao, has himself made a film in which he demonstrates

all the techniques needed to make it big on the silver screen.

MUSIC PLAYS

HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

HE LAUGHS

HE COUGHS

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

HE LAUGHS MANIACALLY

Kuldi Bhai.

Kuldi Bhai!

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

After a few years, the narrative breakthrough, which had been

made in the '70s by films like Sholay, was slowly forgotten.

And while films still relied on the basic elements of song,

dance and action, they had lost the plot.

Basically, any semblance of plot there ever was

just went out the window.

Any semblance of emotional through-line went out the window

and they went from set piece to set piece.

Welcome to the '80s.

Now, I think the '80s have got a lot to answer for in terms of fashion...

AUDIENCE CHUCKLES

..in terms of music and certainly in terms of film,

and particularly in Indian film.

They were really derivative and, you know, they were trying to

kind of ape Western films in all the worst kind of ways, you know?

There's the fashion, you had kind of weird techno music that

came in and it was kind of like what does this mean?

This means nothing, absolutely nothing to me at all.

So I kind of fell out of love with Indian cinema at that point.

The late '80s was probably the worst period of Indian cinema, I feel.

I hope I'm not hurting anybody.

HE SIGHS

Because? What?

I think the kind of stories that were written,

the kind of films that were made,

the level of work in each department, whether it was music, lyrics,

acting, direction, cinematography, visual effects, I mean anything.

It was all...not good.

MUSIC PLAYS

The angry young man became a superhero

and the '80s was the absolute low point, you know,

the bottom of the barrel which was

when they were just doing these hideous dances in awful costumes

and there was nothing. I mean, the women had nothing to do.

# Super, super, super, super, Superman... #

By now, light borrowing had turned into outright theft.

In the '80s, everything from Superman to the latest

Hollywood action thriller would get the Bollywood treatment.

Films had become a cynical way of making money and Bollywood movies

of the '80s are so bad that some of them are strangely watchable.

You can't just steal but that's what they did for years and years.

Well, copyright meant the right to copy, I think that was the reason.

You know, I'd interviewed Robin Bhatt,

who was a very successful writer, about 15, 17 years ago

and they had taken Lethal Weapon

and stolen elements of it and made it into a film called Sadak,

a very successful film with Sanjay Dutt.

So I said to him, "But, Robin, you know, where is your talent in this?"

And he said, "My talent lies in knowing what to steal."

THEY LAUGH

In those years, it was like

you make these superhero movies

and it was easy to spend money on it,

it was easy to think that we can make money out of it

until you actually...

There's a burn-out.

But nothing is pushing forward or breaking new ground

or making new cinema.

HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

But at the dawn of the new millennium,

a new kind of Indian cinema did finally come into being,

characterised by films designed to appeal to the Indian diaspora.

A new international aspect dominated storylines

and the modern era of Indian cinema had begun.

I think film-makers realised that there was an audience

outside of India that was watching their films.

Also, India had opened up its borders,

there was more investment going into India.

There was a middle class that was growing exponentially.

Indians were beginning to travel a lot more

so those influences were a lot closer to home.

Satellite TV arrived.

You know, it wasn't quite as easy to just steal stuff from Western

films because people knew where the source was,

what you were stealing, where you were stealing it from.

And also, within that growing middle class,

there was a sense of pride as well about being able to achieve,

about India being able to be a world player.

Generally, what's happening is you have

two set-ups for films in India now.

You have the single screen, which is the large, almost Shakespearean type

of theatre with the stalls, you know, for the poor people

and the balconies for the slightly better-off and...

Generally, large single-screen theatres, they're called,

which contribute about 30%, 20% of a film's revenue.

80% of it, if I'm getting my maths right, is now the multiplex

and that multiplex is a very expensive ticket in comparison

and representative of an emerging middle class in India

that has a bit of money to spend,

that is also quite aware of what is happening in the West

in terms of exposure to television and films

and would like to be stimulated in a similar way.

What happened was film-makers started just to focus on that

multiplex audience.

You know, the urban, the educated, the slightly more nuanced,

sophisticated, satellite-shaped audience

rather than the rural audience

and I remember doing interviews in the '90s with directors

and they were like, "You know, who cares about that village?

"We're done.

"So now all our stories are going to be New York

"and everyone's like falling in love in Australia or London."

I mean London was like our back yard. Every second story was London.

# You and I, you and I

# We're like diamonds in the sky... #

A whole wave of films that presented

the newly attainable dream of a Western lifestyle,

and the consumer culture that went with it, had taken over.

# I knew that we'd become one right away... #

Global movie studios could see the opportunity

and suddenly India was flooded by the likes of Sony, Warner Bros

and Disney all hoping for a piece of the action.

Initially, when foreign companies came in,

there was a lot of excitement,

but they did not understand the Indian market.

They had their own executives from abroad, they just did not know

how to handle the chaos and the lack of transparency of the Indian market.

It's only the experts who had spent their lifetime dealing

and doing business in this market who understand how it works.

The studios have all come in and many of them

have already built their hands making local product in the early

years, so Sony made Saawariya,

Warner Bros made Chandni Chowk to China.

All of these films were just God awful.

Disney made Roadside Romeo with Yash Raj.

None of them worked and I think there was a certain arrogance

that we'll just walk in and, you know,

people in Burbank will decide what people in Bollywood should be doing.

It doesn't work like that.

It's a very unique market, it's a very specific market,

it's a very relationship-driven industry.

It's a different place and I think that the studios quickly realised

that it's not going to work. You can't walk in and just sign cheques.

MUSIC PLAYS

While global movie studios lost huge amounts of money

trying to seduce the middle class Indian market,

the domestic Indian industry was doing just fine without them,

giving the old recipe of song and dance a modern twist.

I'd fallen right out of love with Indian films,

particularly at that time, and then a friend of mine basically said,

"Have you seen any of these films that are out?"

And I said, "No, not really. I went off them a few years ago.

"It's not for me."

I was kind of enjoying the Indiana Jones films

and all the stuff that was coming out of Hollywood.

And he said, "You should take a look."

And the film he handed me had dance sequences in it,

the like of which I hadn't seen before.

The '50s and '60s, it was mainly classical,

and it was mainly the women who were doing it.

I remember Rajesh Khanna's one dance move was this...

LAUGHTER

That was it. Amitabh's was this.

LAUGHTER

But slower, obviously, I've sped that up.

But this was a kind of real hybrid and the film was Dil To Pagal Hai.

MUSIC PLAYS

Bringing an international attitude

to the Indian staples of song and dance

prove to be a real challenge for choreographers.

When I started the first film, Dil To Pagal Hai,

the style was a very Indo-contemporary style,

which is not the normal Bollywood ... what you see.

It was more...

Like a Western Indian style, very unusual.

Not really Indian Indian and not really Western,

it was a mix, a very fine mix.

I think that is what the Shiamak style is,

it's where you don't know if it's Bollywood or Hollywood, it's neither.

MUSIC PLAYS

Were you kind of at all nervous about the reaction

and how did you deal with that?

I was nervous, I was petrified,

I thought it would never work because it was too Western.

I even told Yash, I said to Yash Chopra, "You must know that

"it's never going to work, my style."

He said, "I want your style."

I said, "But it's not Bollywood, I can't do that. I can do what I know."

He said, "No, I want that only

"because the story's about a choreographer

"and there's Madhuri there and there's Karisma Kapoor there."

So I said, "OK, Madhuri, let me see."

There was a song I did with Karisma and Madhuri.

It was in a small little area and they were competing,

the two best dancers in the industry,

and it was like a battle, a dance battle.

MUSIC PLAYS

And it was quite difficult

because suddenly they had to do these jazz or contemporary movements

and they're used to doing only Bollywood stuff

so they were like blown out of their heads, they had to adjust,

but they worked so hard that it just turned out to be a cult film

in the end so I was happy.

Can you spot the actors who can dance and the actors who can't?

It's very easy to get somebody.

I'm still trying to pin you down to exactly...within ten seconds.

-Is it grace? Is it co-ordination?

-See?

You moved your arms extremely well now.

See? That means you can dance.

THEY CHUCKLE

Come. We're going to teach Sanjeev a step.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-Sexy boy.

-Fat guy at the front. OK?

-So...?

-Step together.

-Yeah.

-Step...together. Now, we're going to add the pelvic with it.

-Right, OK.

So, we're going to go...

HE IMITATES BEAT

You know you're quite good.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I've just realised the one thing that those moves, those dances did,

was stop aunties requesting songs at weddings

because prior to that, they would say,

"Oh, come on, play that song from Kati Patang."

And then this. Aunties trying to keep up with that would be too much.

BOYS CHEER

Left, right, left. Left, right, left. Left, right, left.

But then there was a surprising development.

After a few years,

dreaming of new lives in New York or London,

Indian film-makers turned their gaze back,

reclaiming the elements of Indian cinema that made it unique.

There were a lot of films being made for the people of Indian

origin living outside of India.

I didn't do too many of those, you know?

I remember when we were making Lagaan, people were saying...

I mean there were many reasons why Lagaan was not supposed to work

and some of them were the fact that it was not a romantic film shot

in Switzerland where the actors and actresses were not wearing DKNY

and you were wearing totis and bundis

and you were speaking in Awadhi.

I decided that if this film has to be produced then

I have to produce it myself and I was never a producer

but I got into production in order to get that film made.

Lagaan is a Raj-era drama about a group of Indian villagers

who are forced to play cricket against their British oppressors

in a match with life-or-death stakes.

And the film won the hearts of audiences all over the world.

-Finally, got the damned creature.

-Good shot.

-Thank you.

Anyway, it did really well and all of us were really pleased.

It did really well in Germany, in the UK, in the US.

It was nominated at the Academy Awards for Foreign Language

so we were really thrilled, the entire team was really thrilled

with the kind of emotional connection it had with people across the globe.

Music and dance is an essential part of...

-Indian cinema.

-..Indian cinema.

Is that part of a formula

or is that something to do with how Indians are?

Music and song...

-helps you to sharpen an emotion.

-Mm-hm.

So, you've seen Lagaan.

When the film begins, there's no rain, it's not raining.

And the village is going through troubled times,

it hasn't rained for two years.

And then they see this cloud. And they get electrified.

Man, it's going to rain and there's a song over it.

MAN SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

THUNDER CRACKS

CHILDREN CHEER

MUSIC PLAYS

And they sing with abandon because they feel it's finally going to rain.

THEY SING IN OWN LANGUAGE

And the cloud comes and it passes, it doesn't rain.

And they're left stranded and it's like a deep dejection.

-Now, this sharpening of emotion happens because of that song.

-Mm-hm.

If you remove that song, the story will still remain the same,

it's a place where it hasn't rained, and the story will move on.

But the fact that they get so excited when they see one cloud

and the whole village starts celebrating the rain as it's

about to approach, so that song helps you to sharpen the emotion.

THUNDER CRACKS

SHE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Now, the interesting thing about Aamir Khan is that he's been able...

In a way, he's kind of like a George Clooney

in that he's political - small P - he's got a social conscience

so he makes interesting, social conscience films

but the film that he then acted in which caught everyone by surprise

was 3 Idiots.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

The story of 3 Idiots is there are three friends and one of them

has disappeared and the other two are looking for him.

The whole film unfolds with these two friends on a journey

searching for their lost friend, they've lost contact with him.

And they're trying to figure out where the hell he is.

3 Idiots, I think, was the most basic simple story, you know,

about three college students and I don't think there's ever been

a greater film in the recent years as that.

Did you know it was going to be a success? At what point did you know?

I think it's the best narration from a director that I've ever

heard in 15 years of my career.

-Explain the narration.

-The reading.

When he approached me, he called me to his office and he was like,

"I'd like you to hear the script."

And for four hours, he read out the entire script

and I actually stood up in his office

and I was clapping on my own that I'd never heard something like this.

In 3 Idiots, Aamir plays a rebellious college student

who defies the cold hand of authority.

3 Idiots, Rancho was a lot of me,

I walked out of every class in the Film Institute.

They failed me, I'm a failure, they failed me, I didn't get my diploma.

Excuse me.

3 Idiots was a huge hit,

at the time of its release,

the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time.

At its heart lies a clever reinvention -

the angry young man of the '70s has been transformed.

The action hero reinvented

as a sensitive, lovable man of the people.

Excuse me.

Because I am very, very culturally connected with my culture,

with India, and I want to live and die here,

I love the way this country is, the people of this country,

I think perhaps that resonates in my writing and in my movies

and maybe that is why most Indians connect with it...

because it is their culture.

We do not have all day!

Rancho, who is Aamir Khan in 3 Idiots,

a lot of all that came into that character.

So I mean I relate to that character totally and I'm so glad

so many people liked it.

We rely heavily on emotions, we're an emotional country,

that's what our nation kind of relies on -

our hope is based on emotions.

And he just got everything right.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

Yeah.

Who?

You.

I really loved 3 Idiots, I thought it was great.

You know, it was devoid of any violence,

it didn't need car chases, it didn't need explosions,

it didn't need any of those things that I'd come to associate

with the excess of Hindi films.

And in many ways, I think,

it's a film that harks back to some of those films of the '50s and '60s.

I think there's a simple storyline, I think it's well written,

I think it's well acted and I think the songs are great.

MUSIC PLAYS

It was old school, classic romance transformed on-screen.

It was nice, it was simple and I loved it.

Hindi film has been my kind of main experience.

I haven't really seen too much of regional films.

I've always known that they've played an important part.

Satyajit Ray's films were obviously Bengali films

and I'd seen a couple of those but, you know,

I'd heard about how big

and important the Tamil film industry was, for instance,

but I just thought, "I don't speak the language, maybe it's not for me."

And then people started telling me, "You know what?

"Some of their films are pretty good.

"I mean the production values are fantastic

"and the shot selection is amazing and you should have a look."

So I went to Hyderabad.

Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad

is the largest film studio in the world.

Over 1,100 acres of ready-made movie sets, locations and sound stages

all set against the evocative backdrop of the Deccan Plateau.

Every day, thousands of tourists come from far and wide

to marvel and gawp at the movie-making process.

It's like the tour at Universal Studios but on a much larger scale.

Here, punters can do everything from play

a cameo in their favourite movie...

..to having a go at special effects for themselves.

But I'm here because alongside all the tourist attractions,

there are a number of real movies in production.

MUSIC PLAYS

This one's a low-budget transvestite teen comedy.

I've been invited to visit the set of a truly epic film called

Baahubali, the highest budget movie ever made in Southern India.

It's a fantasy with the scale and ambition

of The Lord Of The Rings

and the director, Rajamouli,

is giving me a privileged peek behind the scenes.

The story is very much layered but if you take the plot,

it is quite simple.

It is about a father who is murdered, a son who is thrown away,

presumed dead, and he comes back and avenges the father.

The story, if you take the plot, it is so simple.

This film actually is a film of families, it's a film of deceit,

it's a film of treachery, it's a film of all of those.

My character in this film,

the only thing that he needs is the throne,

and that's where he's getting at and to be there,

he will get everyone out of the way, whether it's his brother or

whether it's his parents, so it's a hard, mean machine.

The sheer ambition of Baahubali dwarves anything ever made

by Indian regional cinema and with so much at stake,

no footage has been revealed.

But I can tell you that they're drawing upon the finest

martial arts and technical professionals from around the world.

Just goes to show that today, the massive commercial potential

of films which appeal to Indians all over the world,

allows for truly epic movies to be produced.

The biggest film I have done before is 1/8 the size of this.

Luckily, the market was also expanding.

Where is the market expanding to and from?

Mainly, it's US but now we are taking to

so many parts of the world.

Telugu is a race that started moving out of India in the early 1900s

and they moved in to places like Malaysia, Taiwan, the Middle East.

The second big migration happened after the rise of the IT boom

that happened in America

so you see a lot of Telugus who have settled in many different

pockets of America, who obviously continued with their culture

who are still modern in their thoughts and approach.

So they kind of found that big Telugu industry in America.

Telugu audience are very dedicated to film.

Actually, if you can go to a big star film release

in the smaller towns,

you will see the print being carried on a carriage with music

and dancing and throwing flowers and garlands on the print,

the film print, all the way to the theatre

and then from the theatres, you'll see 60-foot,

70-foot cut-outs of the hero, garlanded, being pulled over the star.

It's quite an experience.

THEY CHUCKLE

Another way in which the film Baahubali is breaking new ground

is in how the latest cinematic technology is being employed

to tell ancient mythical stories.

Will this be entirely a physical set or will there be CGI?

There's a lot and lot of CGI involved.

When it comes to CGI, our principle is the thumb rule.

The thumb rule is anything that the actors interact with is live.

Anything that they don't interact with is CG.

And because we wanted scale everywhere,

it has to be scale length, it's impossible for us

to actually build anything that we are imagining.

Cutting edge visual effects have become an enormous growth area

across the country,

tapping into the world-leading IT sector and mainstream

Bollywood cinema has also grasped the exciting new opportunities.

I remember, as a kid, going to see Bollywood films

and every time there was a special effect,

-there was a little bit of me that was sick.

-Yeah.

I kind of vomited inside.

I never vomited outside because it's not my style

but on the inside, I did.

Just the quality of technique in Indian cinema has

improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years.

When you see some of the very interesting movies being made here,

they could have been made anywhere in the world in terms

of the quality of the cinematography, the quality of the sound,

and in fact, the quality of the visual effects.

I mean a lot of the visual effects in movies in the west are actually

being outsourced here to India.

What we didn't have earlier was we had the ability to technically

work to a brief but we didn't have film-makers here who were

actually creating those briefs for these organisations

and you do have that today.

I can't think of anybody else who has created a science-fiction

franchise in Indian cinema.

You must be the first.

Yes, I think I'm the first, yeah.

You're a pioneer.

So can you just explain how that came about?

Did you always envisage that there would be three or four

-films in a story?

-No, no.

One day, I saw Lord Of The Rings, I saw all three parts of it together.

I said, "If they can do it, why can't we? Let me try."

The result was Krrish,

a blockbuster franchise

which has already had three

hugely successful instalments.

Krrish was a journey.

The first half where I established that he had a lot of powers

but he didn't know what to do with them.

And in the second half, we show how he uses his powers.

And then the third, Krrish was a full-blown superhero film

with a supervillain and all the characters in the film.

Aside from the commercial success of this new franchise, films like

Krrish have created a world-class Indian special effects industry.

We have got good technicians in India.

So I said, first of all, I will make Krrish 3 with Indian talent,

so I hired Shah Rukh Khan's studio - Red Chillies.

99% of the Indian films, when they are made,

they do a lot of special effects,

but they don't get time for special effects.

I finished my film and I gave them 18 months to do the special effects.

I said, "I should give the Indian talents a chance,

"so that they also get used to it, and then when we make other films,

-"they will be more experienced."

-Mm-hmm.

Indian cinema has clearly come a long way

since the cheesy rip-offs of the early eighties.

And Indian films have evolved,

the production values now are as good as anything in the West.

We've got to a point now where Indian companies are investing

in Hollywood production houses,

buying into DreamWorks, co-financing.

You've got it the other way round, you've got companies like Disney

that have bought UTV and created Disney India to make local content.

As the Indian movie industry has developed at an exponential rate

in recent years, with a huge growth in global revenue,

multinational film studios like Sony and Disney

have learned from their previous attempts to

crack the Indian market and adopted a much smarter business model.

We're actually the Indian arm of the Walt Disney Company,

and what the Walt Disney Company is doing in India is being able

to understand what the audience tastes and preferences are.

It's not like you're just taking one product

and saying it's a one size fits all, you're actually modifying it

to suit the local tastes and preferences of an audience there.

In recent years,

Indian cinematic tastes have widened,

to include new genres like sci-fi and historical fantasy.

But they haven't left more traditional fare behind.

HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Chennai Express is a great example of how the industry has moved on.

SHE INTERRUPTS IN SONG

A classic Bollywood romance with great songs and major stars,

it was financed and distributed globally,

and became one of the highest grossing films in Indian history.

What I think is really interesting over the last few years

is that studios have come in here

and started making local language movies.

Realising that India really is a local market,

and that we like our own heroes, our own heroines, I mean,

we are a movie-obsessed nation.

There are three billion admissions in this country every year,

which is pretty much half the population of the globe.

If you think about that, it's a pretty staggering statistic,

to imagine that three billion footfalls go into

movie theatres in this country every year.

In cinema, what really counts at the end of the day is

-how many people have seen it.

-Mm-hmm.

And we have more people to offer than any other country in the world.

And the thing with the multiplexes,

which have now started to come in, is that they've

kind of allowed room now for other kinds of Indian films to be made.

So, in addition to the blockbusters that we still have -

the latest of which is Dhoom 3,

which kind of broke all box office records,

people are flocking to them as they always did -

but there's also emerging quieter voices,

in a resurgence of parallel cinema, or art cinema.

Recent successes like The Lunchbox

and Dev D have proven

that Indian arthouse - or "parallel" cinema -

has been resurrected, and has managed to reach out to what

were previously mainstream audiences both in India and around the world.

The line between art and commercial cinema has blurred

over the last decade, and we've seen more and more of that.

In the '80s you had movies that were art cinema,

they were watched on dual version,

they'd probably get a theatrical release

of two or three prints in the key cities, and that's pretty much it.

And they would win national awards and be critically appreciated,

but a mainstream audience would still not have access to them

unless they saw it on television.

But today, you've got movies like Dev D or Kai Po Che!,

films that we have made in the last five years that are actually

themes that might have been called art cinema in the '80s,

but which are actually enjoying massive commercial success today.

The most recent break-out hit from out of left field is The Lunchbox.

It's an intimate story about a lonely man who exchanges

love letters with the woman who makes him lunch.

A surprise commercial success, it's also won awards

and critical acclaim at festivals around the world.

This is the biggest myth that we have lived with all these days,

we have been told that our cinema does not have that kind of reach

and people don't want to watch films from India, and really,

they are films, if we make them more universal, we can always reach out.

It happened with Lunchbox, it happened with Wasseypur,

it's happening with...

-And Lunchbox has been released in some 91 countries.

-Mm-hmm.

I saw it in London.

It has found a commercial audience,

and that's a film that we actually marketed and distributed in India.

And it did tremendously well.

It is an English film at the end of the day,

with a very Western sensibility, a very European style of film-making.

It takes its time, the pace of the narrative is slow

and it tells a very intimate story,

but it resonated tremendously

-in India, it did great business.

-Mm-hmm.

But what's really interesting is, you've got your

mass commercial entertainers working at the same time.

It's not like they're going anywhere,

so a Salman Khan or Akshay Kumar movie today

is still doing great business, but a Lunchbox and a Kai Po Che!

are also doing great business. So the audience tastes have broadened.

It's still the same guy going and watching both movies,

but he wears a different hat.

When he goes in to watch Akshay Kumar he leaves his brains at home,

and he says, "I'm just going to have a good time."

My journey now is almost at an end, and it's strangely fitting

that my last encounter with Bollywood should be here in London.

I'm on the set of a brand-new thriller which is

currently shooting at Tower Bridge.

The film, Phantom, stars Katrina Kaif and Saif Ali Khan,

and it's a truly international production.

The journey is very international,

because Kabir likes to shoot in exciting places, so we made an effort

to shoot in Kashmir and Beirut, and to shoot...

This is probably the easiest part.