Entertainment
Hindi Productions in Vancouver: Bollywood West
By Chris Cannon published Nov 1, 2010
I didn’t know whether to watch the stadium deflating in front of me or the guy taking a bottle to the face behind me, so I just stared at the plastic samosa on my plate, which began life as a real samosa but had aged to a synthetic sheen over the three days I spent pretending to eat it.
Let me back up. One day last spring, BC Place Stadium was permanently deflated after 27 years of loyal service to the city skyline. I had a perfect view of the event from the waterfront behind Telus World of Science, which had been converted into a movie set for the Bollywood film Thank You, a romantic comedy mostly shot in Vancouver and Toronto. I spent the week as an extra in a café scene. As actors improvised campy fight stunts with chairs, glasses, skewers, appliances, bystanders, and ripened chickpea pockets, I debated whether I should point out that a key background component was disappearing before the camera’s eyes. A polite mention to the set coordinator settled the matter: “Nobody,” he said, “is going to be looking at the buildings.”
He had a point. Thank You was not your typical low-budget, quick-release Bollywood production. The actors, who used shish kebabs as rapiers take after take, represented some of the biggest names in Hindi cinema. More than once I heard the production called the “Ocean’s Eleven of Mumbai.” If the SUVs that chauffeured each lead actor the 100 metres from the World of Science parking lot to the World of Science patio didn’t convince me that these were bona fide movie stars, the growing throng of Indian girls hyperventilating on the hillside did.
There was the male lead Akshay Kumar, who months earlier had carried the Olympic Torch through Toronto and seemed to bear the brunt of post-pubescent swoons; Bobby Deol, whose action-hero father Dharmendra has sired an entire Baldwinesque litter; Suniel Shetty, who has starred in dozens of films and hosted an Indian version of The Biggest Loser; Irrfan Khan, who played the police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire alongside Anil Kapoor, whose daughter Sonam Kapoor plays the female lead in Thank You. The elder Kapoor is often called the George Clooney of Mumbai. I heard variations of this epithet applied to several actors on set, as in, “That guy is the Brad Pitt of Mumbai,” or “He’s the Matt Damon of Mumbai.” Mumbai is the centre of the Bollyverse, and these comparisons were thrown around so frequently one must assume there is a whole Hollywood/Bollywood matrix—a George Clooney for each city, another for each state, and a reigning national George Clooney for the entire subcontinent.
