The actor describes shooting an unchoreographed, CGI-free brawl for Priyadarshan's Haiwaan, his first film with the director and a reunion with Akshay Kumar after 18 years.
Saif Ali Khan spent two days flat on his back after shooting one fight scene. That's the headline detail he's chosen to share ahead of Haiwaan's release on September 11, and it tells you something about how the film's action was built.
In Haiwaan, Saif plays a character who is visually impaired but trained in martial arts, a combination that sets up the sequence he's now talking about. His character gets beaten down first, kicked and slapped around, before turning on his attackers. "As an audience, you want him to retaliate which he eventually does," Saif said, describing the scene's build-up.
What makes it worth a conversation, according to Saif, is what wasn't used to make it work. No visual effects. No stunt doubles standing in for the tough parts. Stunt master Silva choreographed the sequence, and Saif says the result stayed close to the ground. "There's no special effects added to it, there were no duplicates. There's very little fakery in these scenes," he said. "The room has broken glass everywhere. It was very raw and kind of violent and it was utterly exhausting because after that I had to lie down for two days."
He's since walked back any suggestion that he sailed through it. "I thought I was alright but I was exhausted because that is how intense the action scene was," Saif said, adding that there was no harness work propping up the physicality. "It's really lots of fun to perform," he added, which is the kind of thing actors say after the fact and not usually during.
The prep, or lack of it, is its own small story. Saif said he'd asked for proper training before the shoot but it didn't come together on schedule. Instead, he and the stunt team ran through a handful of movements just before rolling, leaning into the rawness rather than smoothing it out. He remembers the aftermath in specifics: broken photo frames, smashed cupboards, glass on the floor. Cuts and bruises came with it, though he says nothing serious. "The scene lands well in the film owing to the plot because you want him to bash those people who've been so bad to him," he said, crediting Silva as "a master" of the craft.
Haiwaan is Saif's first film with Priyadarshan and puts him back on screen with Akshay Kumar for the first time in 18 years, a gap long enough that the pairing alone is generating some of the pre-release chatter. The cast also includes Boman Irani, Saiyami Kher and Shriya Pilgaonkar. With the film four days from its theatrical release, this fight scene is shaping up to be the one line of dialogue everyone quotes in reviews. Whether the rest of Haiwaan matches that intensity, audiences find out this Friday.
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