Kiran Rao shares how 'Laapataa Ladies' team shot with live railways tracks, movement of big trains

Mumbai, Nov 8 (IANS) Filmmaker Kiran Rao has shared how she worked out with the movement of trains during the filming of her critically acclaimed film ‘Laapataa Ladies’.

The filmmaker spoke with IANS in Mumbai after her film won 13 Filmfare awards. She said that a large part of the film was shot with live railway tracks.

She told IANS, “We had been assigned one track. We were shooting on two railway stations in Maharashtra. This was a station called Yeola, which was the station that people see as Patila in the film. And that's a pretty major station. A lot of the north-south trains pass through there. And the other station was a smaller station called Kanegaon where we shot Moorthi station which was supposed to be Deepak's village station where the final reunion happens. So we had less to shoot in Moorthi but on Patila we had the entire track of Phool and Manjumai’s characters on that platform. And this was a rather major station so we were lucky in the sense that it visually looked like the kind of station we wanted. A little bit set back in time but not as old as Kanegaon”.

However, Kiran said that the team was “unlucky” in a way because there was only one platform on this station.

She further mentioned, “So actually every time a big train would come in, our train would have to exit the station. So there were only certain hours in which we were allowed to shoot our train sequences. And like you said, it also meant that we were shooting with a live track next to us. And safety was a very big concern. It helped that we were in the Covid-19 time so there was a big restriction on the number of people you could have within a certain area”.

“So actually a big number of people on our set were security. We had to lock off parts of the set because obviously they were live stations with actual passengers. And we would have everybody very carefully monitored with badges and things before they even entered the train. Sometimes background actors were in the train, the train would go off to let another train come and then come back. So things to coordinate, it helped a lot that production was tight and was very prepared for these kinds of scenarios thanks to Covid-19”, she added.

--IANS

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