Ananya Ghosh (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 12, 2014)

From making realistic poop samples for English August and shooting against cardboard miniatures for Jajantaram Mamantaram to creating the gritty reality of Black Friday, No Smoking, Gulaal, and Gangs of Wasseypur, and erecting the rusticity-tinged baroque sets for Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-leela, it seems production designer Wasiq Khan has done it all. Not quite. He has now recreated the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi, for a ghost! Yes, for Nitesh Tiwari's Bhoothnath Returns, he has done just that.


In the film, Amitabh Bachchan plays the ghost and they had to shoot in Dharavi. "We knew that we would not get permission to shoot with Mr Bachchan in such a crowded area due to security concerns. So, we recreated parts of the slum inside a studio,” he says nonchalantly.

But before that the team shot in Dharavi for three days with a Bachchan lookalike.

“We mostly took wide angle shots so his face is not visible. The rest of the scenes were shot on the sets with Mr Bachchan in a manner that it all flowed seamlessly. You will not be able to tell the real from the artificial, given the attention to detail," says the man who specialises in imbuing a lived-in feel and texture to the sets he creates.

A film with a ghost is bound to have special effects, so before preparing for a shot, they had to keep in mind camera angles, the computer graphics (CG) and the post-production in general. Suppose we have put up a window, we need to have a clear idea of what the CG team will create behind it. Many scenes were shot on a chroma background.

“While working on such projects, we have to be 100 per cent sure about how the final shot will look like and work backwards from there. Every step has to be calculated well in advance. There is no margin for error. It is maths meets arts,” explains Wasiq.

The friendly ghost is not confined only to the streets of Dharavi. He also travels to Hell and Heaven.

"Hell was the first set to go up. Sixty per cent of what you will see on screen is the set, and the rest is special effects,” he adds.

But, for Big B, more than the phantasmagoria of the computer generated graphics, it was Wasiq’s meticulously designed set that surprised him.

“On the first day of the shoot he took a good half-an-hour to inspect the set," recalls Wasiq.

"Later, he even tweeted about it saying that such a detailed set enhances an artiste’s performance,” he quipped.

Asira Tarannum (MID-DAY; February 11, 2014)

If sources are to be believed, designer and co-producer Shabinaa Khan has been rubbing people the wrong way. It is being said that Wasiq  Khan, the art director in her film Gabbar, has quit the project due to irreconcilable differences.

What makes this news more interesting is the fact that he is not the only one to have had problems with Shabinaa.

Within a week of the film going on the floors, this Akshay Kumar-Shruti Hassan starrer, which is being produced by Viacom18 Motion Pictures and Sanjay Leela Bhansali along with Shabinaa, tasted controversy: sources said that five crew members walked out of the film, owing to her short temper and high- handedness.
Then there was news about Shraddha Kapoor being asked to opt out of Gabbar as the actress didn’t have dates to spare.

A source says, “A lot of crew members have quit the film because of Shabinaa Khan. And this time around, she didn’t ask them to leave; they quit on their own because they couldn’t deal with her acid tongue anymore. She is known to insult people on the sets and this isn’t the first time she’s facing such problems — she had people walking out during the making of Rowdy Rathore as well.”

When contacted, Wasik said that he has opted out of the film due to personal reasons. “Shabinaa and I are like family – it’s just that I had to come to Delhi for some personal work and that's why I am no longer doing the film. I have recommended some names to them,” he said.

Shabinaa Khan echoed his statement. “There’s no truth to this. Wasiq had to rush to Delhi and take a month off, so he is not able to do the film,” she said.

But our source maintains that this is not the case. “A lot of people on the sets are scared of her because of the way she treats people.”

Ankur Pathak (MUMBAI MIRROR; November 30, 2013)

For the sequel of the 2010 sleeper hit Tere Bin Laden, director Abhishek Sharma has re-created Abbottabad-- the Pakistani district where Osama bin Laden was found and killed by American forces on May 2, 2011. The set has been erected by production designer Wasiq Khan in Mumbai’s Film City.

Mirror has learnt that the sequel has a sequence which shows the former al Qaeda chief’s assassination, but it has a satirical spin to it. “We are mocking both the American forces as well as Pakistan. I hope nobody takes offence,” says Sharma.

"While we were shooting the scene, it suddenly started raining. This added to the drama and made the sequence more real," he adds. His production designers did extensive research to create the Pakistani suburb in Mumbai, getting specific details about the house and the environment.

Using VFX technology, the makers have also created a Black Hawk—the chopper which was used by the Navy SEALs and was crucial in Laden's assassination, putting an end to America’s decade-long manhunt for the world’s most-wanted terrorist.

"We only had a rough sketch of the chopper which was leaked to the media by the American officials, as our reference points," says Sharma. Previously, a similar helicopter was created for Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated Hollywood thriller Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Produced by Pooja Shetty of Walkwater Media, the sequel is expected to release in 2014 and features Manish Paul and Sikandar Kher in the lead roles. Ali Zaffar, who had an important role in the first film, will be seen in an extended cameo, while Pradhuman Singh reprises his role as Osama bin Laden.