Akshay Kumar-Aishwarya Rai's sceret 70s looks

By Subhash K Jha

On the sets of Vipul Shah's time-travel caper Action Replay Akshay Kumar retro-wig which he wears for his 1970s look is his most prized possession.

Apparently the wig designed by one of Hollywood's biggest makeup artistes Paul Pattison (who's done films like Braveheart and Mission Impossible 2) made Akshay paranoid.He was petrified of losing it.

Says Vipul, “Since we haven't copied our 1970s look from Hindi films Akshay and Aishwarya sat down to look at real- life footage from the decade to get the look right. They specially looked at television footage of live cricket matches in the 1970s.

Akshay was busy peering at the pavilion of spectators, what they wore, how they spoke moved their body language. That's how he conceived his character in the 70s. That's where Paul Pattison's wig came in.”

There are 400 other wigs all done under Pattison's supervision for junior artistes posing as people in the 1970s.

Says Vipul, “We were very particular about the 1970s look recreated at the Nitin Chandrakant Desai's studio in Karjat.

We needed the cars from the 70s which we had to get from all over India from private owners at a very heavy price. The BEST buses in the 1970s were very different from their counterparts today.

Getting authentic BEST buses from the 70s was the hardest part of the whole era-recreation. Getting Akshay and Aishwarya to go retro was the easiest thing. They had a ball getting into their wigs clothes and body language.”

We saw Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone traveling back to the 1970s in Om Shanti Om.

But Akshay was adamant about doing his retro-look very different from SRK.

Director Vipul Shah takes serious umbrage to the suggestion that the retro look in his film is similar to Om Shanti Om.

“We haven't copied anything from the films of the 1970s (as Om Shanti Om has). If we got into that 35 mm space we'd have ended up copying only Mr Bachchan's clothes and style. Akshay insisted we do more authentic research. We dug into archival material on the clothes mannerisms and people of the 1970s.”

And now Vipul Shah is paranoid about his 1970s LOOK going out. “We, Akshay's designer Shabina Khan, Aishwarya's designer Manish Malhotra and all of us have worked really really hard to give Action Replay a unique look. If that look is leaked out we'd lose our biggest USP.”

Much like the Big B's Paa look which was given out premature.

“We're taking stringent steps to ensure the confidentiality of our look, ” says Vipul. And what does he have to say to Action Replay being compared with Back To The Future?

“Well earlier my film was supposed to be The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. Now that accusation has been wrongly passed on to another film (Paa). Now I'm supposed to have copied Back To The Future. Again, untrue. If anything all time-travel films including mine are inspired by H.G Wells' Time Machine.”