After a long wait of the fans, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ has been released in theaters on June 26. Akshay Kumar starrer ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ is a film which has 34 big actors. Directed by Ahmed Khan, the film stars Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Paresh Rawal, Johnny Lever, Rajpal Yadav, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade, Aftab Shivdasani, Jackie Shroff, Daler Mehndi, Mika Singh, Raveena Tandon, Lara Dutta, Jacqueline Fernandes, Disha Patani, Urvashi Rautela, Farida Jalal, Krishna Also starring Abhishek, Mukesh Tiwari, Yashpal Sharma, Vindu Dara Singh, Kiran Kumar, Zakir Hussain, Pankaj Dheer, Punit Issar, Kiku Sharda, Firoz Khan (Arjun), Akshara Singh and Sudesh Leary.
Actually, did Ahmed Khan face a lot of challenges while shooting the film with such a big cast?
According to the information, there were around 900 people on the set every day, who were handled by Ahmed Khan alone. Besides this, there were 50 vanity vans and 250 cars. Ahmed Khan said many things about the film in an interview.
Ahmed Khan tells how he made ‘Welcome to the Jungle’
When Ahmed Khan was asked how many people were present on the set of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, he told ‘The Hollywood Reporter India’, “The audience will see only 34 main characters in the film, but the number of people working behind the scenes was much more than this. Preparing for such a big star cast and high level shooting was a huge and challenging task in itself.”
150 people, 200 crew members from the film 30 actors
Not only this, Ahmed Khan further said, ‘But the real calculation is that apart from the main actors, their team is also present with them…especially around 150 people accompany each star. There were also 200 crew members, stunt team, horsemen and 150-200 background dancers. For many days, there were 700 to 900 people on the set, whom I was managing.
Two grounds for 900 people
He further explained how much space he needed for the set of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Not only was it a big challenge for him to find space for 900 people every day, it was also difficult to manage the cast’s vanity van. Ahmed said, imagine what it would have been like to prepare for a shoot on such a big level. We didn’t just need a ground. We used to find two large, adjacent grounds because we needed space to park 50 vanity vans.
Handling 250 cars and 50 vanity vans on shoots daily
Ahmed Khan told that we needed an extra holding area for the background actors and a cabin for the main unit. After this there was also the matter of commuting. Actors came in their own cars, technicians in their own cars and there were separate vehicles for the make-up team, hair stylists and personal staff. We have to handle around 250 cars daily.
This plan was made to handle 34 actors
Ahmed Khan told that shooting with such a big star cast was not easy. He said, “First of all, I got my team to install a big chart board in the office, on which photographs of all the artists were displayed. I did this so that I could keep an eye on them every day and I would be clearly aware of which artist would be present for the shooting on that day.”
He further added, “The most difficult task was to fit everyone’s shooting schedule together. Taking dates of five days from some actors and eight days from others and then planning the scenes accordingly was like solving a complex puzzle. Our team very carefully collected the available dates of all the actors and planned the entire shooting based on that.”