Upala KBR (MID-DAY; April 29, 2019)

"It was like making seven different films," says director Ali Abbas Zafar, the ambitious scale of Bharat not lost on him. The central plot of the Salman Khan-starrer — that of tracing India's journey from the Partition to the present day through the protagonist's point of view — may be simple, but executing it was a different ball game altogether.

The director, along with production designer Rajnish Hedao and stylists Alvira Agnihotri and Ashley Rebello, dedicated one-and-a-half years to research the different eras before taking the Katrina Kaif and Disha Patani film on floors.

The most challenging chapter, he says, was recreating the Partition. "The way the Partition was depicted in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi [1982], was my benchmark. We shot the sequence over 10 days in Punjab, in the freezing cold. The scene required us to recreate a station near Lahore, replete with a steam engine. Of the five functioning steam engines in the country, we had one brought to Punjab. The art department worked on it for four days to make it resemble those from the Northern Frontier Railways of 1947."

When cinematographer Marcin Laskawiec came on board, he had detailed mood boards ready for him. "We did thorough research, based on the material available in libraries and museums, of what a circus looked like in the '60s. Salman's look in that decade is modelled on Elvis Presley, who was a rage at the time. We got vintage cars, costumes and even newspapers made, to stay true to the era. Reimagining the '70s and '80s [was relatively easier] as we could source props from bazaars in purani Delhi, but we built everything from scratch for the preceding decades."

Zafar adds that a distinct colour palette has been used to depict each period. "The Partition era is in desat [desaturation] mode, while we have employed Eastman colour for the '60s and '70s, and sparkling colours for the next two decades."