Ranveer Singh, who has been working with Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani, lets us in on a secret about Priyanka. He says, “While shooting for Dil Dhadkne Do, whenever Priyanka would come on the set, she would dominate everybody because she knew what she was doing every single time. We were awestruck while working with her.
But having never worked with Sanjay Leela Bhansali (apart from one item song in Ram Leela) before, she was mostly clueless on the sets of Bajirao Mastani. She didn’t know how it works there.” About Bhansali’s style of working, he says, “Sanjay Leela Bhansali treats his actors as collaborators and not executers. He involves all of us on the sets in totality. He is very demanding.
On other sets we do time pass, are busy tweeting. But it’s very different with Bhansali’s film. Priyanka was not used to all this. To see someone so comfortable in the past, it was fun to watch her go out of control.”
He adds, “Where other directors finish two scenes in a day, Bhansali takes five days to finish one. We usually don’t even know what we are going to shoot when we enter the sets on a given day.” About prepping for his character, Ranveer adds, “We had to learn long dialogues in five minutes and that too in Marathi. To speak the dialogues in Marathi at the last minute was difficult. Like Netaji had said ‘you give me blood and I will give you freedom’, here you give him blood and he will make you an actor.”
