Location Diaries: Narrow escapes

Aari, who is presently working on his next, Alekha, directed by Rajamithran, claims to have had a series of narrow escapes while shooting for the film. He remembers one particular day when they were shooting for a song in a house in Shenoy Nagar. “I had to run and jump on the bed, on which actor Aishwarya Dutta would be lying,” he says. Before he could do it though, the choreographer tried to show him how he wanted it to be done, and jumped on the bed. “The bed caved!” he says. “We were quite shocked. It would well have been me on the receiving end, if the choreographer hadn’t decided to do it himself.”

The house-owner, when asked, mentioned that the bed had been recently repaired. “They definitely didn’t expect that we would be jumping on it, and didn’t think to tell us,” says Aari.

Another time, Aari and Aishwarya were on a motorbike on ECR. The scene demanded that actors, dressed as cops, check their documents. “We were shooting late at night, and the people around thought real policemen were checking for documents, and starting forming a queue behind our bike,” he says with a laugh. “Some people avoided the check by going back and taking another route.” Finally, some people noticed Aari resting near his car and realised it was a shooting. “And then they started lining up for selfies,” he says.

On the same action-packed evening, Aishwarya and a few other actors were rehearsing their dance steps on the middle of an empty road, when a real cop who was on rounds wanted to know what was happening. “It took a while to explain that we were just shooting for a film, and then they finally left,” he says.