Shah Rukh to make Bollywood's costliest movie

By IANS

Mumbai, Feb 15 (IANS) Indian screen superstar Shah Rukh Khan is spending an estimated Rs.1 billion for perhaps the costliest Bollywood movie to be made so far. The movie for children will be in the VFX medium, using computer-generated special effects.

It will be a movie featuring a lot of children who wish for bad things, but get a shocking reality check when they come true, Shah Rukh told Patrick Frater of Hollywood's top trade magazine Variety in a recent interview in Berlin.

He is talking to Eros Multimedia and Charles Darby (of "The Matrix" and "Minority Report" fame), the visual effects guru, who recently co-ventured with Eros to launch Mumbai-based special effects Eyeqube Studios.

Shah Rukh said he was planning the movie under his home banner, Red Chillies Productions. The new venture - to be directed by Anubhav Sinha - had a budget of $25 million (almost Rs.1 billion), making it the most expensive Bollywood movie to date.

"We are dedicating the next eight or nine months to taking the best technicians from around the world and asking them to help us make the best VFX film India has ever made. It will be madcap, over the top. I want it to be as beautiful as 'Spider-Man' in terms of effects," Khan told Variety.

The VFX medium uses computer-generated effects that give movies a fantasy-like feel. The best example of a VFX movie is Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park", where computers made the dragons fly.

Asked why he has not yet been courted by Hollywood, he replied in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner: ""I'm waiting for someone like Steven Spielberg or James Cameroon (of "Titanic" fame) or some other great person like Ang Lee to make a film, a film about a brown, thin, scrawny Indian guy who doesn't speak English too well. If they ever have a character like that and Google it, I'm sure they'll find me."

He said he'd love to do an action-comic movie like Chris Rock and Jackie Chan.

"As a producer I would like to make an Indian film that genuinely crosses borders, not a crossover film, where you forget that it has a language, like 'Life Is Beautiful'. I didn't realise at first that it was an Italian film. Or 'The Lives of Others'. I think I can do it in my lifetime, maybe in the next five years."

Shah Rukh admitted to the interviewer that his last year's home production, "Om Shanti Om," was full of clichés of Indian cinema. "But it is full of heart. I think we need to make more movies like this and gradually more and more people will come to like that," he said.