MUMBAI: Behind the scene stories of the classic Ramesh Sippy film ‘Sholay’ have always excited the movie buffs.
Amitabh Bachchan, who played the intense young man Jai, recently shed light on an unknown fact from the film.
At a recent event here, while speaking about Ramesh Sippy’s sense of accuracy, the Shehenshah of Bollywood shared an experience from their shooting days, where they waited for three-long years to get one perfect shot for a scene.
Here’s what Big-B said, “I wonder if you remember a scene in Sholay, where Jaya (Bachchan) is lighting a lamp in the corridor of her home on the first floor and I am sitting in the outhouse playing my mouth organ. There was a particular kind of lighting required for that shot. Our DoP (Director of Photography) was very keen that the shot be done at the time when the sun is setting. You would not believe that we spent three years before we finally got that shot because every time we would get to enact that sequence, something would not be right with the lighting and Ramesh Ji said, until we get the correct light, we are not going to film this. Hence we waited for three years for one flash of a shot in the film.”
A 1975 film that also stars Dharmendra, Jaya Bachchan, Hema Malini, Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan was ranked first in the British Film Institute's 2002 poll of ‘Top 10 Indian Films’ of all time.