The Gangubai saga
Finally, it is a wrap for Gangubai Kathiawadi after two years
This schedule of this shoot was initially slated to be a day–long affair with Alia. But then the taskmaster that Bhansali is, it took a while for him to get satisfied with what he wanted. The last shots of Alia with her girl gang took a little longer to finally wrap up. The sets of the film will now be dismantled after being up for two years
It was a gruelling three-day shoot for Alia Bhatt as she and Sanjay Leela Bhansali managed to finish the pending shoot of the much-awaited film at Mumbai’s sprawling Film City Studios.
According to an industry source, this schedule of the shoot was initially slated to be a day–long affair with Alia. “But then the taskmaster that Bhansali
is, it took a while for him to get satisfied with what he wanted. One might recall the last sequence of Bhansali’s 2002-film Devdas, in which Paro turns around to see a dying Devdas outside her house, Bhansali had taken three days to just can the bouncing of her pallu on
t e ground. So the last shots of Alia with her girl gang took a little longer to finally get done and dusted. The sets of the film will now be dismantled after being up for two years,” the source explains.
Incidentally, Gangubai, which also has Ajay Devgn in a cameo appearance as Haji Mastan, was slated to be the fastest film the master auteur would have made, but fate had other plans, with the corona pandemic ensuring that it wouldn’t be so. But our source reaffirms that if one were to count the number of days the filmmaker shot for the film it’s still on the lower.
BHANSALI’S WAYS FOR ALIA
Alia Bhatt has two different looks in the film — one when she’s a 15year-old who lives in a village in Gujarat and the other as the madam of the brothel in Kamathipura in the then Bombay. The village shoot, we are told, was done in a set and her younger days have been captured extensively, which will be used a lot in the flashback sequences in the film. In the movie, Alia also has a romantic track with TV star Shantanu Maheshwari.
Not many may be aware that Gangubai also had an interaction with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in her life. When the late Indian prime minister had met her, there was an effort to break down Kamathipura back in
Mumbai. In the film, the
older Gangubai is draped in cotton sarees. “The idea was to make sure that Alia need not put on weight to play the older character. Bhansali and the costume team ensured Alia looked bulkier with the aid of heavy cotton sarees from that era without putting on a lot of weight,” adds our source.
Bhansali has a way to make his actors work on the sets. While one can recall how he had alienated Ranveer Singh into one corner of the location and kept him out of bounds from the other cast and crew in an attempt to get him serious about the character.
“Even Alia was isolated and was allowed to converse very less with the rest of the team. And it helped Alia get in the skin of her character. In fact, Bhansali went ahead and had around 50 retakes for a speech during a crowd sequence of the film,” adds the source.