Life in the fast lane

The Bourne Ultimatum action director roped in for Ajay, Anil, Zayed’s extensive parkour sequence in Tezz.

If you think you have seen enough of parkour sequences in Akshay Kumar’s cola commercials, think again. Priyadarshan’s forthcoming action thriller, Tezz for producer Ratan Jain’s Venus Films promises not one but two extensive chase sequences of which one will extensively have parkour. It will be the most expensive shot for a Hindi movie as Garath Milne, who worked on the action sequences of Matt Damon’s The Bourne Ultimatum, has choreographed the action for the Bollywood film featuring Ajay Devgn, Anil Kapoor, Zayed Khan and Sameera Reddy.

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The actors took four days to rehearse the parkour chase sequence after which Milne took a week to film it in Birmingham, UK, where a marathon schedule was completed recently. Interestingly, Kapoor and Khan had to do more parkour than Devgn as his character was required to escape with the latter on a jetski.

Jain recalls the sequence where Kapoor is on Khan’s trail around a canal in the heart of the city. “Ajay, who is keeping an eye on them, helps Zayed escape on a jetski at the end of the chase which covers half a dozen different locations, right from a mall to a canal. But it was not as easy as it seems as Ajay’s jetski turned turtle on a couple of occasions,” reveals the producer.

Elaborating on the Hollywood style of functioning, the producer says that once they submitted the storyboard, Milne painstakingly planned the thrills. “Garath and his team came on the location well prepared. The actors rehearsed this sequence for a couple of days to get the timing right. The safety measures taken by Garath ensured that there wasn’t the slightest risk of anything going wrong,” raves Jain.