Days after disclosing that she had to endure 99 takes for a dance sequence in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar," Richa Chadha shared her emotional state during the challenging process. She admitted feeling "totally demolished" as the filmmaker's patience wore thin, but remained determined to perfect her performance. Despite the pressure, Richa resolved to get it right, demonstrating her unwavering commitment to her craft.
Richa described her position on set, while she was fighting to get the photo correct, to Galatta Plus, “He (SLB) is a master because he is a classically trained Odissi dancer, so he knows the taal, he knows the rhythm. I am trained in Kathak, which is a very different form. So, for that scene, I think he did a mixture of like Kubrick and Spielberg because he did 99 takes, he didn’t get it and he said ‘pack up’, and he left. Then, after a few days, he was like, ‘I am not happy with that take,’ and I was like, ‘I know, what do you want me to do?’ So he said, ‘let’s do it!’ and we canned it in 20 minutes.”
When asked what she was required to do while performing and what directions Bhansali gave her, Richa stated that she was entrusted with completing the dance steps, humiliation, and intoxication all at once.
She shared that SLB wanted her to "live up to something" like Pakeezah, she said, “I think, he and I were doing a song for the first time. The song per say is not just a song. The premise of that is very sacred to him. It’s like from Pakeezah being invited to her lover’s wedding to perform a mujra, which in itself is a very humiliating premise. So he was very like, ‘you got to live up to something,’ and he wanted… he is not just happy with the dance, he wants the drunkenness to come through, he wants the delusion to come through that she is dressed like a bride, he wants the Kathak, the footwork and everything to be perfect, but he wants a breakdown in real time and in a single round trolley shot where the camera is slowly zooming in. The thing is I give him full credit because he is a master. So, he definitely knows what he is doing, just that the standards are high.”
Richa then revealed that her struggle to perfect the shot was so intense that she asked the crew for a quarter of gin to authentically portray drunkenness while dancing. She shared, “For me, I’ll tell you, on that day, after take 20, which was normal, because I am not hitting the mark and he also put this big guldasta (bouquet) on my head, it is very heavy, so when I was turning, I was balancing and the roses were hitting me, the costume was very heavy. So when I’d spin I wouldn’t land on the mark. So he was kind of losing patience with me.”
She also shared the sharp critique and feedback that Bhansali was giving her while directing her. She shared, “He was like ‘in this take, there is no drunkenness and in this take, the dance is not good, in this take, the eyebrow didn’t arch at this point of time’. So, there was always something. He is not from the school of thought that you can cut and shoot dance. He wants long takes. So I even thought that I wasn’t drunk so I called for a gin after 6 pm when there were only three hours left for the shift. I asked for a quarter of gin, wondering what if I’d need to get drunk for real. So there I am, the AD’s are giving me looks and I am slowly swinging it. I am like, ‘I am not used to alcohol, this is going to make me pee. I don’t know what I am going to do in this dress, I can’t even get out of it’. I just sucked it up and just didn’t move from there for those… I think it took 8 hours for the 99 takes to happen.”
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