Vikram Bhatt who worked as a chief assistant of Mukul Anand on the sets of Amitabh Bachchan’s Agneepath has taken a trip down the memory lane. Recently while speaking to News18 Showsha, the filmmaker shared an intriguing anecdote from one of the shooting sequences where all assistants were standing in the background hearing some fans visiting to see Big B.
When Bhatt and his colleagues were busy chatting, they overheard the group of fans saying with a laugh, “Arre, Amitabh Bachchan hai toh kya hai yaar. We’ll just go and tell him thoda right mein, thoda left mein.” And when Bachchan came and asked them ‘Do you want a picture?’, according to Vikram they were “gobsmacked. I think that’s the word! They were like, ‘Yes.’ All the fun and jokes they had planned to throw at him, they couldn’t.”
Further in the interview, Vikram admitted that Amitabh Bachchan became a star because he was a good actor, not vice versa. The 55-year-old admitted that he learned a lot daily and called the people working on the movie ‘true powerhouses of talent. Bhatt added, “When I look around now, I don’t see anyone who even comes close to that era.”
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According to the Raaz director, the comparison is obviously unfair as they are completely different periods considering techniques have evolved and audiences have shifted. “But back then, it was still the analog era, not the digital one. We did things the old-fashioned way. I especially learned a great deal from Waman Guru, or Waman Sahib (Bhosle, film editor), who was the one who taught me editing and whom I consider my editing mentor,” Vikram Bhatt expressed.
Released in 1990, Agneepath is a cult classic helmed by Mukul Anand under the joint writing of Santosh Saroj and Kader Khan. It was produced by Yash Johar and was inspired by the life of gangster Manya Surve. The movie’s title was adapted from a poem of the same name penned by Big B’s father Harivansh Rai Bachchan. This crime thriller actioner won Bachchan his National Award for Best Actor.
