One of the biggest challenges during the making of Airlift was the research related to it because there is little documentation of the 1990 Kuwait evacuation. The big question was, how much of it should be fact and how much should be fiction. Most of the information that we collected was from people’s personal experiences. But personal experiences are very myopic. Luckily we had a great team — Priya Seth, a war photographer, sourced a lot of videos from the time. Mustufa, the production designer, collected hundreds of images. Viral and Uday Singh Pawar, my associate directors, looked into the tanks, choppers and costumes of that time — the fine details.
All along, we tried to make patriotism seem emphatic rather than jingoistic. I am tired of jingoism (in our movies). The film posed logistical challenges too. We were working on a shoestring budget and didn’t have too many soldiers on the team either. Uday came up with this ingenious plan that we rotate the existing crowd and multiply them on screen. He created maps and graphs for different groups that would interchange positions to give the feel of a bigger crowd.
Budget was a constraint too. We needed cars to burn and had to work with only 20. So we would finish a sequence and repaint the car for the next shot.
I have to make a mention here of Mini Sarma — a fantastic line producer. A lot of what you see in the film is live ambience and not VFX. The scene where Ranjit Katyal (Akshay Kumar) comes out of the embassy is real. I needed 200 soldiers and we had only 45, with no money for any more. But the team made my vision come alive.
Another scene that’s special to me is when Ranjit goes to the driver’s house after his death. We first felt that it needed no dialogues. Then we had a change of heart and wrote some dialogues. But when we shot the scene finally, Akshay instinctively said that I don’t think we need to say anything here — he just stood there, in front of the driver’s wife with nothing to say. The scene where he comes searching for his wife has a story too. The scene shows the house in shambles — something Akshay wasn’t aware of before the shot because he loved that house. He’d tell us that he wished it was his house. He saw how it lay now and insisted on picking up the camera and shooting it himself. We both shot that part, but the one that was finalised after the edit was the one shot by Akshay.
