Akshay Kumar-Katrina Kaif starrer ‘Namaste London’ is still a fan’s favorite. Akshay’s patriotic monologue spoken in the film is widely shared. Even today people get goosebumps after hearing it. But at that time, Akshay had to go through many emotional phases while filming that scene. Not only this, the British citizens present there were also surprised to hear the monologue about India’s tradition, culture and heritage. This has been disclosed by film maker Vipul Amritlal Shah himself.
The dialogues of the film were written by writers Suresh Nay and Ritesh Shah. Vipul told that he had worked hard on this scene for three months. Even till the morning of the shoot, he was busy improving it. Vipul also remembered Katrina and Akshay’s reaction on this scene. While talking to Pinkvilla, he told how emotional he had become.
Akshay-Katrina got excited after hearing the scene
Vipul said- Akshay and Katrina had read the script and they knew about this scene, but I kept telling them not to go by those dialogues, I am going to bring a better scene for you. But when he read it, he said ‘Vipul, this is great, this is great and this is going to be huge.’
Vipul told that he asked Akshay and Katrina to keep it as simple as possible, because he had full faith in the effective dialogues of the scene. He said- My instructions to both of them were to keep it very simple. We don’t want to bring any drama into this. Just say it as simply as possible. This will be effective and this is what Akshay and Katrina did.
Akshay-Katrina became emotional
Vipul said that actually Akshay and Katrina got so emotionally excited that they ended it quickly. He said- I finished the dialogue portion of Akshay and Katrina in less than 2-3 hours because they became very emotional. And became very excited. I had forbidden anyone from doing any kind of improvisation in this scene. This was the first time that Akshay did a big patriotic monologue. He hadn’t done monologues like this before, so I was very curious to see for myself how he was going to do it.
Crew affected, British citizens shocked
Talking about the impact of the scene, Vipul said that while he was shooting for it, he noticed that the crew around him were surprised to know all this information about India. He said that he had called only 12-13 people from India. The remaining crew of about 300 people was from the UK. After listening to the dialogues, some British people said that you must be making all this up, this cannot be true. Then we told them that every line of it is real. He was shocked.
Because of the scene, there was a lot of change in 12-13 people of the Indian crew. We saw that the unit and the actors had become very excited. The Indian crew started feeling that they were more powerful than the UK crew of 300 people.
Namaste London was released in 2007. The film was a superhit at the box office. The music of the film was also a huge hit, it was given by Himesh Reshammiya. Rishi Kapoor was also in the film.