With Pathaan marking Shah Rukh Khan’s first film in four years, director Siddharth Anand was keen to create an offering that befit his stardom. In a bid to make Pathaan a “visual spectacle”, Anand took his cast and crew, including Khan, Deepika Padukone, and John Abraham across eight countries for the shoot of the actioner.

“The selection of the right locations is always an important part of making a film, and it was more crucial for an actioner like this one. We wanted to create a spectacle for audiences; one that they have never seen before,” says Anand, whose previous offerings include dramas like War, Bang Bang, and Bachana Ae Haseeno.

Filming for Aditya Chopra’s production took place across Spain, UAE, Turkey, Russia and Siberia, Italy, France, and Afghanistan. “This was done to achieve a variation in the [settings]. A lot of planning went into deciding how we would go about filming.”

Pre-production for the film, which also releases in Tamil and Telugu, took nearly two years to complete. “Our aim was to create a film that would raise the bar of action movies in India. We have shot in remote and exquisite spaces so as to make the film both immersive and outlandish,” says the director of the January 25 release that was shot near Paris’s Eiffel Tower, and Siberia’s snow-clad mountains.