magine a job that requires you to travel across the world to discover the most exotic of places — places befitting the country’s biggest stars and our films’ most beautiful songs. Natarajan Ramji, better known as the ‘location guru’ in film circles, has that job.
His career is built on taking film crews (and the audience consequently) to the world’s most beautiful places. As part of his job, Ramji has travelled across 100 countries to shoot nearly 1,200 films. More recently, this resident of Chennai took the crew of Dilwale to Iceland, to shoot the song ‘Gerua’ in a most unconventional location.
Ramji says, “I’m sure Shah Rukh Khan’s (SRK) fans wouldn’t be too keen to hear this, but we shot ‘Gerua’ near an active volcano. An eruption has been overdue for the past five years in Mt. Hekla; it could have happened at any time… even when I was shooting there with SRK. But these are the lengths one needs to go to, when trying to recreate the magic of ‘Suraj Hua Madham’.”
Shooting in Bulgaria
Dilwale is his first major Hindi film, and Ramji says the opportunity came to him after an accidental meeting with Rohit Shetty, the film’s director. “I had convinced Ajay Devgn to reconsider shooting portions of Shivaay in Bulgaria, after its crew had failed to shoot in Canada.
At one of these meetings in Mumbai, I just happened to meet Rohit Shetty, and I explained how we could shoot a lot of Dilwale’s action scenes in Bulgaria. In India, all we see are Tata Sumos and Scorpios being blown up for the sake of action. But in Bulgaria, I could offer Porsches, Jaguars and Bentleys at the same price it would cost us to hire auto-rickshaws here.”
When the director approached Ramji with a request for a place to shoot ‘Gerua’, Ramji wanted to find them a place that was out of this world.
“So I took them to Iceland… the place where Hollywood films go to shoot visuals of other planets,” he jokes.
Armed with the latest in drone technology, Ramji’s crew was able to capture Iceland in its true beauty.
“This is a major difference between the Southern film industries and Bollywood,” says Ramji.
“South Indian films have money too, but they don’t spend it on the right things. When you back the scale, reach and budget of Hindi films with some cutting-edge technology, the results are much better than what we achieve down South.”
Ramji was also one of the pioneers in taking film crews to Switzerland for song shoots, a country that is considered synonymous with Yash Chopra. “I have shot over 300 films in Switzerland. By the mid-nineties, shooting songs in Switzerland had become so popular that I began to take crews to New Zealand.
This allowed us to shoot right through the year, even when it was winter in the Alps,” he points out.
While his job may seem like a bed of roses, there’s a flipside too. Apart from scouting for locations, his job also requires him to arrange for the necessary permits required to shoot.
He says he has a fair idea of how bureaucracy works in different parts of the world. Even then, there are exceptions.
“I remember a horrifying instance where I had taken an entire film crew to Uzbekistan, only to be driven out by the Customs Department for not having the required papers to bring in camera equipment.” On a good day though, he becomes invaluable. For instance, he is the only guy to have managed to procure permission to shoot at Machu Picchu (for Enthiran / Robot ); a location that even the crew of a James Bond film couldn’t shoot in. When asked if he believed he had the best job in the world, Ramji agrees.
He says, “(When you die) You’re not going to take back your money, cars or your fancy house. It’s the experiences that make a man rich… I’m the richest when it comes to that.”
Ramji was also one of the pioneers in taking film crews to Switzerland for
song shoots
