Nana Patekar recalls being burnt on the sets of Parinda, stabbed during Salaam Bombay: I was in hospital, couldn't work for a year | Bollywood News

Recalling the scene, Nana told Lallantop, “It was a real fire. I was actually burning. After that shoot, I couldn’t do anything for a year. I was hospitalized for 60 days. The scene where you see me trying to escape the fire, I was actually burning. All my skin had peeled off… there was none left. There was no beard, no moustache, no eyebrows, no eyelids. For six months, I was on complete bed rest.”

He added: “It wasn’t a risk I took, it was an accident. How long do you need to engrave? It only takes you five seconds to burn. In those five seconds, everything I mentioned was burned. In the first take we put three buckets, in the second we put 14 buckets, so the fire was intense. However, it was an accident, it was not that Vinod (director Vidhu Vinod Chopra) wanted me to burn. It just happened.”

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On the 30th anniversary of Parinda in 2019, Vidhu Vinod Chopra had also reminisced about filming the iconic scene. He said: “Nana refused to wear a fire suit, I thought if you don’t wear the suit I won’t shoot you.” So he wore the shirt, then I asked him to wear the bottom, he told me “I won't do it in front of you”, so I left the room, but he didn't wear it. And then during filming, he got burned.

Talking about other such accidents, Nana recalls being stabbed for real in Meera Nair's Salaam Bombay. Nana remembers that although everyone loved the shot, no one realized he had been stabbed. “Do you remember a scene where this guy comes to stab me? For this scene, they had tied a tire around my waist, but with the force with which the boy stabbed me, the knife actually stabbed me and I was bleeding. They were thinking, “Kya is doing ki hai.” These kinds of accidents continue to happen.

In the same conversation, the 74-year-old actor also revealed that the final scene of Krantiveer was not scripted at all. “I just said it, the entire dialogue. Now, if you ask me, I won’t remember a single word that I blurted out that day. The now iconic scene was impromptu,” the actor said.

“I was in the hospital. The next day we were supposed to shoot. I thought that if I died today, my producer and director would die tomorrow. So I decided to finish filming. I took a few cardiograms of me, I thought I was fine, but the doctor insisted that I rest for a few days, while Mehul Kumar had everything ready on set. He's a good man, he said that. Wasn't a big deal if we had to take losses for these two days, please rest and we will shoot after that I had chest pains for which I had to be hospitalized.

“The climax was planned over 6 days. I got there with my doctor and my friend Ashok who always took care of me. When I arrived, they told me we were going to write the scene. I was like, “What do you mean, you’re going to write?” ”, then they told me how they wanted the scene to be, I heard and then I said to myself, let's take a lunch break. We will start at 2:30 p.m. I said to install at least five cameras and add extra magazines altogether. For a camera to always be on, we need to have multiple angles. We started at 2:30 p.m. and finished filming at 5 p.m. After finishing my monologue, I didn't know what to do, so I did this whole drama, “Phaasi pehna chal” because I didn't know what else to say, and that was it. Now many people imitate my scene, but I won't be able to do it myself anymore,” Nana added.

On the work front, Nana last appeared in the film The Vaccine War. He is now gearing up for Anil Sharma's Journey, among other films.