Why Rajkumar Santoshi followed Ajay Devgan?

The director, whose next film Halla Bol has Ajay Devgan playing a film star, asked the cameraman to follow the actor at movie sets to make the character look real.

Rajkumar Santoshi has always made Ajay Devgan do the unusual.

In HallaBol, releasing in January, the actor plays a film star and to give a dose of reality to the character, the director had cameraman Nataraj Subramaniam trail Ajay at movie sets and functions.

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Santoshi told IANS: "The idea is very simple. We needed to capture Ajay's personality as a film star in all its facets. And to do so we needed to see him relaxed and unconscious of the camera.

"The best way to get my character's public personality was to follow Ajay into his daily activities. We caught him on the set of Omkara with Kareena Kapoor. We'll be using that footage to show our hero's professional side."

This is a unique experiment merging fact with fiction. The other instance where a filmmaker tried to fuse real footage from Bollywood into his film was Manmohan Desai.

In Naseeb, he captured all the big stars from Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman to Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore at the jubilee celebration of Desai's Dharam Veer as Amitabh Bachchan dressed as a waiter mingled with the guests singing John jani janardhan.

"It's like a docu-fiction, very unlike other films on showbiz. We want to show the real deglamourised side of Bollywood."