Stunts from Luck – How they were shot!

Allan Amin, the action director of Sohan Shah’s Luck goes into detail about how the life threatning stunts were shot. He claims the stunts weren’t rigged and performed by the actors themselves. Interesting read..

Helicopter Scene – All lead actors excluding Sanjay Dutt jump from a height of 100 feet in this breathtaking scene

This scene was shot in six days. It is another betting scene. In this scene, all the actors have to jump from a helicopter, open their parachutes and land on the ground. This is the first bet, so there are 10 characters jumping from the chopper. But when they jump, two parachutes don’t open and one of them dies. Shruti’s parachute also does not open but she is rescued by Imran. To shoot this, we had nine professional base jumpers [parachute jumpers, who jump from heights] from South Africa, who are trained to do such stunts. They jumped from a helicopter from a height of 1,000 feet. The actors jumped from a height of 150 feet but it looks like they jumped from 1,000 feet. We had tied them with cables. But the body doubles did not have any cables.

Burning Train – Climax sequence

It took us 10 days to shoot this scene. It is the climax.

Shruti is tied in front of the train and Imran — running on top of it – tries to rescue her. Sanjay Dutt plants mines on the train and Ravi Kissen tries to shoot them, so that they explode. He is in a helicopter with Mithun. When they try to shoot, the chopper misses its balance, and collides with the train, setting it on fire. It was not difficult to convince the actors because there were safety precautions. There was a fire suit and fire gel. There were fire extinguishers on each boogie. Plus, before the stunt was carried out, my stunt man showed them how to do it. The pilots in the helicopter and train driver were trained as well. We shot this scene in Bangkok with the proper permissions. The fire was electronic, in the sense it would start with the push of a button and stop with another push of the button. But the scenes are not rigged. It’s real with real people doing it. There were no accidents during the shoot. But since we were shooting for many days, Imran’s hair started stinking of smoke. But he did not get burnt at all.

Sanjay Dutt introduction scene – Running against moving trains!

This scene was a risky shot. We shot it in Goa in the train yard. But in the film, it looks like a foreign country. This is Sanjay Dutt’s introduction scene in the film, where he and some foreigners jump in front of a train and run across the tracks. Sanjay Dutt is blindfolded and handcuffed, and still has to cross eight railway lines. In Goa, there are only four lines. So we shot it in the yard and built a few tracks. Sanjay Dutt is game to anything. Plus, he is very strong and so can do stunts easily. When he jumped in front of the train, the train was 10 feet away from him.

Shruti Hassan races through mines!

This scene was shot in a day. Shruti Hassan was required to run through the mines, even as they kept exploding. Shruti did this stunt herself. We had about 10 to 15 mines exploding. All the explosions were in control, they happened with the press of a button. We had a fire extinguisher on the sets too. We also knew the strength of the blast so we kept her that much away from the explosion.

In the sea, with the sharks!

It took us a week to shoot this scene. It comes in the middle of the film. This is one of the bets shown in the film. All the actors are handcuffed inside a container and thrown into the water. The container door is open. They have to remove the cuffs, come out of the container and swim to the top. To dramatise the scene and make it more challenging, there were sharks after them. We shot the water sequence in Durban, South Africa. We went into the middle of the sea and started throwing small fish to attract the sharks. We had eight professional safety drivers, who stayed in the water, and sent in one actor at a time. We did not have any problem during the shoot — expect that Imran started vomiting due to sea sickness.

Courtesy – Rediff

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3 Comments

  • Do actors really do these type of risky stunts themselves, or are these all false claims only to generate public interest towards the film. Before any action movie releases we always get to hear about the stunts in the film and how the stars did those all by themselves. Akshay kumar is known to do his own stunts, but nowadays it seems that all stars are doing their own stunts, makes me wonder if there is any truth in these stories. Like to know what the indicine team think.

  • Tremendous starting scene from Sanju baba. I like that scene a lot. and other all stunts are superb.

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