Akshay Kumar-Katrina Kaif starrer ‘Namaste London’ is still a favorite of fans. Akshay’s patriotic monologue in the film is shared a lot. Even today people get goosebumps listening to it. But at that time Akshay had to go through many emotional phases while filming that scene. Not only this, the British citizens present there were also surprised to hear the monologue about India’s tradition, culture and heritage. This has been revealed by the film maker Vipul Amritlal Shah himself.
The dialogues of the film were written by writers Suresh Nay and Ritesh Shah. Vipul told that he worked hard on this scene for three months. He was busy improving it till the morning of the shoot. Vipul also remembered Katrina and Akshay’s reaction to this scene. In a conversation with Pinkvilla, he told how emotional he became.
Vipul said- Akshay and Katrina had read the script and they knew about this scene, but I kept telling them don’t go by those dialogues, I am going to bring a better scene for you. But when they read it, they said ‘Vipul, this is very good, this is great and this is going to be very big.’
Vipul told that he asked Akshay and Katrina to keep it as simple as possible, because he had full faith in the effective dialogues of the scene. He said- My instruction to both of them was to keep it very simple. We do not have to bring any drama in it. Just say it as naturally as possible. It will be effective and Akshay and Katrina did the same.
Vipul said that actually Akshay and Katrina got so emotionally excited that they finished it very quickly. He said- I finished the dialogue part of Akshay and Katrina in less than 2-3 hours because they got very emotional. And got very excited. I forbade anyone from doing any kind of improvisation in this scene. This was the first time Akshay did a big patriotic monologue. Before this, he had not done such monologues, so I myself was very curious to see how he was going to do it.
Talking about the impact of the scene, Vipul said that while he was shooting it, he noticed that the crew around him were shocked to know all this information about India. He said that he had called only 12-13 people from India. The remaining crew of about 300 people was from the UK. After listening to the dialogues, some British people said that you must be making all this up, this cannot be true. Then we told them that every single line of it is real. They were shocked.
Because of the scene, there was a lot of change in the 12-13 people of the Indian crew. We saw that the unit and the actors got very excited. The Indian crew started feeling that they were more powerful than the 300-member crew from the UK.
Namaste London was released in 2007. The film was a superhit at the box office. The music of the film was also a huge hit, it was given by Himesh Reshammiya. Rishi Kapoor was also in the film.
Source (PTI) (NDTV) (HINDUSTANTIMES)