Sneak peek: on the sets of Dilwale

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For possibly the first time in the history of Bollywood, a filmmaker has agreed to show money shots (unedited, raw footage) of a film to the media, even when the shoot is in progress " a prerogative of the distributors exclusively. We were invited to Ramoji film city in Hyderabad to catch a glimpse of the action on the sets of Rohit Shetty's Dilwale. So here's what we saw " a huge house shown to be Shah Rukh's in the film, stands tall and bright. A lavish living room has a lush green lawn on one side and a garage with a host of swanky cars on the other " a giveaway of SRK's character in the film, that of a car modifier/designer. The go-to name when one mentions car modification, Dilip Chhabria has designed the cars and some of them are so stunning, you have to try very hard to curb your enthusiasm about taking them for a spin.

Sneak peek
The much talked-about romantic song featuring SRK-Kajol in Iceland lives up to the hype. Shot against mountains and blue waters, it is ethereal. A Rohit Shetty film is incomplete without action and what we saw next was in line with the sequence from The Fast and Furious " a row of cars including Mustangs and Rolls Royce being blown away. It was fierce and jaw dropping. Apart from that, two songs shot with Kriti Sanon and Varun Dhawan and some comic scenes with Varun Sharma, Johnny Lever and Sanjay Mishra.

It's ludicrous that people who write about films don't get to see it from close quarters: SRK
But giving us a glimpse of the action isn't an exercise in publicity, SRK assures us. What then? "A lot of things that we do get reduced to a few adjectives " marketing, box office, etc. I have been working for 25 years, I may be the senior most person in the room right now and I realised this about three years ago (while working on Chennai Express) that all of you (journalists), are film writers but you don't spend enough time seeing how the film is made. I have been to a radio station and I know how it works, which is why I appreciate it more " there's a dark room, people making noises and trying to make things funny. In newspapers, people work to back a story. Whether it's good or bad, I appreciate the amount of time invested into it. It's ludicrous that people who write about films don't get to see it from very close quarters. That wasn't the case around 15 years ago or so."