Ayan Mukerji shares details of Bramhastra during an interview with IMDb

Entertainment fans rely on IMDb to learn more about celebrities and filmmakers while staying current on breaking entertainment news and trends. Having recently unveiled candid details from from actors such as Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt  for Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva, Aamir Khan for Laal Singh Chadda and Rohit Saraf and Prajakta Koli for Mismatched Season Two, IMDb spoke with Ayan Mukerji during a recent ‘On The Scene’ interview. The filmmaker went on to reveal exclusive details about the conceptualization and filming of his opus blockbuster film, Brahmastra Part One: Shiva.

A stellar fusion of VFX, excellent cinematography and memorable romance, Bramhastra Part: One Shiva witnessed the most advanced VFX in the history of Indian cinema. The film that stars Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Amitabh Bachchan is a global success and the first movie of a three part franchise.

Speaking about Bramhastra having a global connect, Ayan Mukerji said, “The story of the film is very rooted in me, in India and my experiences of having lived here. The visual effects have been led by a company called the Double Negative based out of London, which is also in a way connected with producing the film. The music orchestra of the film was all recorded in Vienna in Austria, so the film took us there. So yeah, the film took us all over the globe in a way.”

Recalling how the climax of Bramhastra was created, he said, “The climax of Bramhastra is an extended climax of 20-25 minutes. We started the shoot of Brahmastra with the climax which is very unusual for any film. We felt if we take on the most challenging part of the film first, it would just be great overall and would kind of teach us how to make this film. There's all this like energy, whizzing powers, all these energies interact in the climax and all those energies obviously had to be created. We made a decision to film the climax completely on an indoor studio stage, complete against  blue screen. We needed to create spectacular lighting to kind of stimulate the light of what it’s like when the Brahmastra wakes up. We realised that we were running into hurdles doing that in India and so we moved this setup completely to Bulgaria. We were able to bring in a lot of resources from different parts of Europe into Bulgaria. And so we finally filmed the climax over a period of two months in Sofia in Bulgaria and that was the beginning of our film with probably our biggest crew that we ever had, technical crew that ever worked on the film. This was in the beginning of 2018 and then 3 years later we were still working on finishing the visual effects of that sequence.”  

Speaking about what he is most proud of about the film, Ayan said, “One, I am very proud that in the root of Brahmastra and then beyond it the astraverse, we are aiming to take so much inspiration from just Indian roots. Like a whole younger generation will get more excited to explore just Indian spirituality.”

He continued, “Brahmastra is an original piece of fantasy writing. A lot of the big films in the West that we admire today are all based on comic books and literature that were already created. Brahmastra, like Star Wars and Avatar, is unique in that it is a completely original fantasy. Me and my team survived and have delivered Brahmastra overall.”