I knew Neerja is looking at us: Ram Madhvani

What are the trials and triumphs filmmakers face when working on their labours of love? Here, director Ram Madhvani talks about his latest cinematic offering, Neerja, a biopic on the  braveheart Pan Am purser Neerja Bhanot.

The biggest challenge while shooting Neerja was to capture the essence or soul of the incident — it is more important than capturing the actual event. That is important of course, but it is crucial that the audience gets a sense of what people felt in a certain situation. It involved never-ending research because I wanted to convey the sentiments on the doomed flight.

The shoot though, was wrapped up in 32 days. Everybody told me that a film like this would need at least two months, but I assured them that it’d be done in 32 days and it did. We were able to wrap up in a stipulated time because I believe in detailed planning. I plan in a way such that I am free during the shoot. My execution though, is more organic. We had a shamiana put up on the set with Neerja’s photograph and we would light a diya in front of it every day. It also encouraged actors to understand the responsibility at hand. I wanted them to know that we’re not just shooting a film, we’re retelling a very important story. That we would go home after the shoot, but not many people on Neerja’s flight did, and that needed to come through.

Working with a big crew means there is always an imminent threat of people dropping out. We had 250 passengers on the set and I thought that there’ll be a 10 per cent dropout every day. But there was none. I had kids with a 103 degree C fever coming to shoot not because I forced them to, but because they wanted to. I can get aggressive with my team, but never with my cast. I want them to keep coming back on the sets. We worked with all the possible shifts — 12 hour shifts — 6 am to 6 pm, 9 am to 9 pm and so on because I wanted the passengers to look sleep-deprived. If you’ve been on a flight for 42 hours, you can’t look fresh. I wanted the cast to convey a sense of being washed-out.  

One of my biggest fears was that there was a film industry strike looming over our heads during the shoot. We had a crew of about 500 people and it was a mammoth task to organise the shoot each day. There was a threat of the rains as well. We wanted to finish before the monsoons. Strike would mean a delay, so I had already started thinking about dismantling the plane and making alternate arrangements.

But somewhere I knew that Neerja (and then her mother Rama Bhanot) were looking at us; that the film is blessed because her spirit was with us. I think that is why the strike got called off a day before it was to happen and we finished shooting without having to worry about the rains — or anything else.