Action director Sham Kaushal opened up on the challenges of shooting an immolation scene with his son Vicky Kaushal for Shah Rukh Khan’s Dunki.
While Shah Rukh Khan-Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki failed to mint big bucks at the box office, the audience appreciated Vicky Kaushal’s acting prowess in his extended guest appearance in this 2023 film.
In one of the most heartbreaking sequences of the film, the actor’s character in the film, Sukhi dies by suicide by setting himself ablaze after receiving the news of a tragedy.
Recently in a chat with Friday Talkies, Sham Kaushal admitted that he was quite scared while directing his son Vicky‘s immolation scene in this film.
The action director shared, “I was very scared. See, when we are planning a sequence I am a bit ruthless, I don’t think about how it will happen. Even today when I get films, when I visualise sequences, I… Aadmi ka mann chor hota hai, woh darta hai (A person’s instincts take over, and fear sets in). So I don’t think about it and visualise how it will ultimately look.”
The action director then went on to share that he had initially planned for Vicky’s character to run away from the fire in this sequence. However, he felt that this approach wouldn’t convey the desired emotion.
“I was like if he runs, it will look like a stunt because he (Vicky)’s character is dead inside when he takes the call and comes out. He is a dead man so he isn’t thinking about the fire. So if he runs then the emotion won’t come out properly,” Kaushal explained.
He further said that despite the challenges, he was determined to pull off that scene perfectly, and recounted how the film’s director Rajkumar Hirani had even remarked how he had never seen Sham so anxious before.
Speaking about it, the action director said, “It’s not only about Vicky, it could be any child. They are all like my children, they all started off together. So if he ran it would be easy. But that’s not how we would get the right emotion. And we wanted to achieve the best out of that scene.”
Dunki featured Shah Rukh Khan and Taapsee Pannu in leading roles.
