Sholay at Minerva: The Film That Ran for Five Years
Siddharth tells the story of Sholay's slow opening week in 1975, the 70mm print at Minerva cinema, the Gabbar dialogues that spread by cassette, and the ending the censors made Ramesh Sippy change.
Chiffon in the Alps: How Yash Chopra Invented the Bollywood Switzerland
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Show notes
Chiffon in the Alps
For two decades the Swiss Alps stood in for every dream sequence in Hindi cinema. Siddharth looks at how Yash Chopra's visual language was built, from the Kashmir shoots that became impossible in the late 1980s to the Jungfrau glacier that now has a statue of him.
- Kashmir, Chandni and the move to Switzerland in 1989
- Cinematographer Manmohan Singh and lighting a white sari against snow
- Why the songs were shot last and in a different country from the film
- Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the diaspora audience it was made for
- The tourism numbers and the Yash Chopra train
Listeners write in about the first time they saw snow on screen.
Transcript
Namaskar, welcome back to Interval Bell. I am Siddharth Venkataraman. Last time we sat in Minerva cinema for five years with Sholay. Today we are going somewhere colder. If you grew up on Hindi films in the 1990s, you have a very specific image in your head. A woman in a white chiffon sari, a green meadow, a snowy peak behind her, and absolutely no explanation of how the hero got there from Delhi. That image was built deliberately, by one director and one cinematographer, after the valley of Kashmir became impossible to shoot in. We will follow Yash Chopra from Chandni to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, find out how Manmohan Singh lit chiffon against snow, and ask what a Bollywood dream did to a small Swiss town. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Interval is over.
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