Santoshi captures Ajay on candid camera

Mumbai, Dec 17 (IANS) Rajkumar Santoshi has always made Ajay Devgan do the unusual. In "Halla Bol", releasing in January, the actor plays a film star and to give a dose of reality to the character, the director had cameraman Nataraj Subramaniam trail Ajay at movie sets and functions.

Santoshi told IANS: "The idea is very simple. We needed to capture Ajay's personality as a film star in all its facets. And to do so we needed to see him relaxed and unconscious of the camera.

"The best way to get my character's public personality was to follow Ajay into his daily activities. We caught him on the set of 'Omkara' with Kareena Kapoor. We'll be using that footage to show our hero's professional side."

This is a unique experiment merging fact with fiction. The other instance where a filmmaker tried to fuse real footage from Bollywood into his film was Manmohan Desai.

In "Naseeb", he captured all the big stars from Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman to Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore at the jubilee celebration of Desai's "Dharam Veer" as Amitabh Bachchan dressed as a waiter mingled with the guests singing "John jani janardhan".

So far, films about Bollywood have mostly looked at showbiz with tinted glasses. The exceptions being Guru Dutt's "Kaagaz Ke Phool" and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's "Guddi" and now Santoshi's film takes a candid look at Bollywood.

"It's like a docu-fiction, very unlike other films on showbiz. We want to show the real deglamourised side of Bollywood."

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Halla Bol