« Back to article

Print this article

The Coolest Daredevil stunts in Luck

This week's release Luck has packed in quite a few action stunts.

From running atop a burning train to swimming with sharks, the film promises to be quite the thriller.

And stunt director Allan Amin seems quite proud of these daredevil stunts, where he has made the cast -- Imran Khan, Shruti Haasan, Sanjay Dutt, Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Denzongpa, Chitrasi Rawat and Ravi Kissen -- go through some rare experiences in life. After all, most of the stunts are done by the actors themselves.

Allan Amin talks to Patcy N about the most dangerous stunts in the film. Over to him:

The Burning Train

It took us 10 days to shoot this scene. It is the climax.

Shruti is tied in front of the train and Imran -- running on top of it - tries to rescue her. Sanjay Dutt plants mines on the train and Ravi Kissen tries to shoot them, so that they explode. He is in a helicopter with Mithun. When they try to shoot, the chopper misses its balance, and collides with the train, setting it on fire.

It was not difficult to convince the actors because there were safety precautions. There was a fire suit and fire gel. There were fire extinguishers on each boogie. Plus, before the stunt was carried out, my stunt man showed them how to do it. The pilots in the helicopter and train driver were trained as well.

We shot this scene in Bangkok with the proper permissions. The fire was electronic, in the sense it would start with the push of a button and stop with another push of the button. But the scenes are not rigged. It's real with real people doing it.
 
There were no accidents during the shoot. But since we were shooting for many days, Imran's hair started stinking of smoke. But he did not get burnt at all.

Jumping from the helicopter

This scene was shot in six days. It is another betting scene.

In this scene, all the actors have to jump from a helicopter, open their parachutes and land on the ground. This is the first bet, so there are 10 characters jumping from the chopper. But when they jump, two parachutes don't open and one of them dies. Shruti's parachute also does not open but she is rescued by Imran.

To shoot this, we had nine professional base jumpers [parachute jumpers, who jump from heights] from South Africa, who are trained to do such stunts. They jumped from a helicopter from a height of 1,000 feet. The actors jumped from a height of 150 feet but it looks like they jumped from 1,000 feet. We had tied them with cables. But the body doubles did not have any cables.

Jumping in front of a running train

This scene was a risky shot. We shot it in Goa in the train yard. But in the film, it looks like a foreign country.

This is Sanjay Dutt's introduction scene in the film, where he and some foreigners jump in front of a train and run across the tracks. Sanjay Dutt is blindfolded and handcuffed, and still has to cross eight railway lines.

In Goa, there are only four lines. So we shot it in the yard and built a few tracks.

Sanjay Dutt is game to anything. Plus, he is very strong and so can do stunts easily. When he jumped in front of the train, the train was 10 feet away from him.

Shooting with sharks

It took us a week to shoot this scene. It comes in the middle of the film.

This is one of the bets shown in the film. All the actors are handcuffed inside a container and thrown into the water. The container door is open. They have to remove the cuffs, come out of the container and swim to the top. To dramatise the scene and make it more challenging, there were sharks after them.
 
We shot the water sequence in Durban, South Africa. We went into the middle of the sea and started throwing small fish to attract the sharks. We had eight professional safety drivers, who stayed in the water, and sent in one actor at a time.

We did not have any problem during the shoot -- expect that Imran started vomiting due to sea sickness.

Dodging the mines

This scene was shot in a day. Shruti Hassan was required to run through the mines, even as they kept exploding.

Shruti did this stunt herself. We had about 10 to 15 mines exploding. All the explosions were in control, they happened with the press of a button. We had a fire extinguisher on the sets too. We also knew the strength of the blast so we kept her that much away from the explosion.