Assistant Action Choreographer for India’s Biggest Director – Filming Director Shankar’s “Ai” in Anhui
About 2 weeks after I wrapped on My Lucky Star (starring Wang Leehom and Zhang Ziyi), a good friend and action coordinator Peter Ming asked me to join him for work on Director Shankar’s “Ai” – This would be an Indian movie – A Tamil language Indian movie by India’s largest director to be exact. Shankar’s “Ai” is a romantic thriller film produced by Aascar Films.
Meet Director Shankar. He is known as the James Cameron of India because of a 2010 film he shot called “Endhiran” nicknamed the Indian Terminator. The movie is about a robot designed to be like a human which falls in love with his creator’s wife and then goes on a terminating warpath. There is some pretty crazy action! See what I’m talking about here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRfV_kkEd4
(For China Viewers)
If you want to see more action from the movie check out this clip.
Shankar’s movie “Ai” stars veteran Indian star Vikram Kennedy and Amy Jackson along with Suresh Gopi. Vikram was great to work with. We did some action scenes together and I interacted with Vikram and Director Shankar quite a bit since the Indian team spoke English and Tamil while the stunt team mainly spoke Chinese. We had a translator, but since I spoke English it was convenient for them to communicate action related work to me directly.
Shankar’s “Ai” should turn out to be a really interesting movie. The movie is still in production at the moment. They plan on taking over a year to shoot because of certain artistic reasons that affect the plot. This is going to be one of those posts that will be updated later on because since the movie isn’t out yet so I’m just going to share what’s public.
In any case the main hero winds up in China and someone is after him. This is where the action team comes in!
That Chinese character above the archway means “luck”. Also when you say my English name phonetically in Chinese it has that same character.
The first week I arrived in Anhui to meet up Peter. He filled me in on the action requirements and the story then we began location scouting for the action scenes.
We also visited Hongcun Village. We were very close to the beautiful Huangshan aka “Yellow Mountain”, but did not have enough time to go check out the mountain due to the shooting schedule and then the weather.
For this movie I helped with choreography, wirework, and fighting Vikram.
Peter is a master with wires. He frequently works with Director Tony Ching and was also one of the main people responsible for the wire work in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. There was quite a bit of interesting wire work on this film. Speaking of which… we had some of Asia’s top BMX guys flown in for this project.
A few of the guys were from Hong Kong and Taiwan. We had riding, flipping, chasing, and makeshift ramps… it was fun watching them fly through the sky.
After a long day of either location scouting, planning, testing what we wanted to do on wires, or shooting we sat down to some local Anhui home style cooking.
The Chinese food was good! On set the Indian crew also had there own food prepared. They had an Indian chef make all types of curry and naan.
None of the Chinese stunt guys wanted to try the Indian food, but I was excited to get some near authentic Indian food (We were in China after all, but they had an Indian chef on set). All of the Indian crew ate the food with their hands. It’s definitely not something I’m used to seeing, but I gave it a try. I thought the food was really tasty!
Hanging out with some of the stunt guys on lunch break. We had about 15 core guys and then for a few days we had 20-30 extra guys come for some scenes.
And that’s a wrap! After a few weeks of intense shooting of all the action scenes, the Chinese team was wrapped and the Indian team went back to India to continue filming. From talking to Director Shankar I could tell he was a person with passion and vision. I think this should be an interesting and entertaining movie. Not to mention – I can’t wait to see some of the singing and dancing scenes!