Salar de Uyuni in Southwest Bolivia is the largest salt flat in the world, measuring roughly the size of Qatar. A dried-up lake, the white desert-like expanse is so large and reflective that NASA uses it to position its satellites.
This makes it a photographer’s paradise, but it would take a person travelling from India roughly 36 hours to get there.
Early last year, the cast and crew of Telugu film Sarrainodu took this arduous journey to shoot a song titled ‘Telusa Telusa’, becoming the first Indian film to do so .
Amusingly, the second crew to take the trouble wasn’t really a film crew. It was a team that comprised Gopi Kavikkai and his wife Akhila, who shot a nearly identical version of ‘Telusa Telusa’, costumes and all, to share... for their wedding anniversary.
Sveti (Saint) Jovan Kaneo Church on Lake Ohrid, Macedonia at sunset
The number of Indian tourists travelling abroad is set to touch 50 million by 2020, according to UNTWO (World Tourism Organistaion), and cinema is a major influencer in helping Indians decide where to travel. “Foreign governments understand the influence films have on tourists and that’s why they want to associate with Indian cinema,” says ‘Location Guru’ Natarajan Ramji, whose job is to facilitate film shoots in exotic foreign locales. “When an Icelandic delegation visited India to promote their tourism, all they had to do was keep playing Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Gerua’ because it was shot there and people immediately connected with it.”
Between the earth and the heaven. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
It helped that the song was YouTubed over 200 million times, which is, “practically, free advertising for Iceland”, he adds. As a result, the number of Indian tourists travelling to Iceland has increased “ten-fold” says Ramji. He adds that this is now a surge one could not have achieved with any amount of advertising or brochures.
Government support
In return, foreign governments offer tax breaks, cash incentives and permissions to shoot there. Director Siva, who recently shot Ajith’s big-budget Vivegam in Serbia and Bulgaria, said in an earlier interview, “There are certain action scenes and chases that can only be imagined outside India, because we need wide open roads and a trained crew to shoot it. More than the economics, certain sub-genres, such as a spy thriller, work best when the story is set abroad. We need the cooperation of the people and the government there for that.”
Vijay’s recent Mersal was shot in Macedonia, a first for a Tamil film. “The director wanted to shoot a part of the film in Paris to show the hero being given an international award for his humanitarian activities,” adds Ramji. “But shooting in France would have cost a lot more. With the support of the officials from Macedonia, we were able to shoot those scenes with over 1,500 extras there. We saved at least ₹15 crore in the process.”
For a cinematographer, a new location presents an opportunity to add visual quality to a film. “There’s no need to try hard,” says Ravi K Chandran, who shot films such as Yuva , Dil Chahta Hai and Ghajini . “The farther we travel away from the Equator, the more there’s a tendency for sunlight to become angular. This is perfect for what we call ‘backlighting’ and the effort for my frames and our actors to look great is much lesser,” he says, adding that he shot Ghajini ’s ‘Guzarish’ in Namibia, inspired by the red desert visuals of Jennifer Lopez’s The Cell .
It’s a win-win situation for both the film crew and the country. India’s youngsters, with deeper pockets and a love for social media, present a great opportunity for tourism boards to invest in. “For earlier generations, exotic locations in films were seen as more aspirational than realistic. So when Yash Chopra shot in Switzerland in the 70s, going there was more like a dream.”
A younger audience
But not any more, adds Ramji. “Millennials invest in experiences and they’d rather spend money travelling than on a house or a car.” And this has only made the job harder for film crews. “One needs to top what a well-travelled audience has already seen when we shoot a film,” he adds. As a result, Indian cinema has opened up countries it has stayed away from for decades. This includes places as diverse as Bulgaria, Bolivia, Serbia, Namibia, Peru, Brazil and Japan.
But our tourists are sure to follow believes Chandran. “I think it’s in our DNA. We love to travel to places where films have been shot, just so we get to pose like SRK or Salman Khan. Even when we visit a place with historical significance, we still love listening to what films were shot there. A 100-year-old bridge in Chennai came to be known as ‘Roja Bridge’ after a scene was shot there.”
