Memes from Delhi Belly are still a part of our cultural zeitgeist but what was it about this film that clicked with the audience back then? And does it still hold? To recap, Delhi Belly is a comedy of errors where a package with diamonds is delivered to the wrong place and the gangster-owners of the diamonds start going after everyone who could have the package. Poorna Jagannathan and Shenaz Treasury are along for the ride as well. One of the biggest plus points of Delhi Belly was its music.
The traditionalists believed that the expletives were unnecessary but the youth called it colloquial. Everything was hollow on the inside. On the day of shoot, it went so smoothly that we okayed the shot in one take. There was no retake.
Abhinay Deo: While it was a set, a 10X10 slab had to fall with actors standing below it. So it was very risky. Kunaal Roy Kapur: It was a very difficult shoot for the most part because we had to be covered in grey powder to depict the aftermath of the ceiling collapse.
We were covered in varying degrees of powder depending on which part of the film we were shooting. For our trial run, we used actual powdered cement for a day. So they finally came up with a different kind of grey dust. I remember sitting and breathing in this dust for many, many days because what seems like a short sequence in the film was an eternal shoot for us. Kunaal Roy Kapur: Abhinay had a keen eye for small details. For the scene in which Nitin buys the tandoori chicken from the vendor, he had figured out: What does the guy selling the chicken look like?
How dirty does he look? How sweaty are the people? We wanted the scene to be sickening, to be gross. You know the film is called Delhi Belly so if there was any sequence we wanted to get right, it was that one. We needed to sell the idea that someone would get sick by eating that chicken. It was great fun to shoot. We did it at a market in Mumbai, we shot the road sequences in Delhi, we shot some of it on set over multiple days.
My contribution to the scene was giving Nitin these tiny details like the way he handles cash. Akshat Verma: The tatti scene was shot exactly how it was written in the script.
Do we show it completely? In one, the focus was on Vijay Raaz and the table was out of shot. The second was a wider shot in which you see them pouring the shit out. We should show it. You did not go there! We had three options in terms of consistency — one very liquidy and two a little more solid. Abhinay Deo: The costume assistant was a young girl and this was her first time on a film set. We were testing the fake tatti and she thought it was real diarrhea and puked all over set.
Akshat Verma: Our first edit was not what we thought it would be. We were heartbroken. This is the first edit. Abhinay Deo: Many of the same jokes landed when we cut them in a slightly different way.
Not much changed. Akshat Verma: We finished editing the film in To their eternal credit, Aamir and co-producer Ronnie Screwvala listened to their feedback but never stopped believing in the film. Their consensus was that we needed a tighter edit, so while the film was being edited, I kept working on some music tracks on my own for almost a year with contributions from Akshat, Amitabh Bhattacharya, Munna Dhiman and many other people before I finally played them to Aamir.
Akshat was a great bouncing board. It was genre-mashing heaven. What would Saigal Saab and the Rolling Stones jamming sound like? What would a sad qawwali played by a funk band sound like? I was making Hindi music for what is essentially an English film, so it had to be that way. It was also the only way that I could bring the world of the film into the film so you get a stronger sense of cultural reference. We had no idea if these songs would make the final cut or if there would even be an album in the first place.
It was a shot in the dark. It was a dialogue and Ram said we should convert it into a song. So we started working backwards, using that as a hook phrase and creating the rest of the song. For the rest of the songs, we had a premise, we had the outline of the characters.
There were no changes. When we wrote the song, the feedback we got was that this was not true to the characters because there was no father-son crisis in the film. But then they decided that it sounded amazing anyway and kept it. Ram Sampath: I was delirious because I felt we had something out-of-the-box in every sense of the term, which represented the spirit of the film perfectly.
The magic of those lyrics is that the song becomes a little film on its own. It starts from the disappointment of the early years to later life inadequacy, it captures the frustration of what the average Indian urban youth experiences on a generational basis.
The entire marketing team would attend long music sessions at the studio. We shot these great music videos for each and every one of those songs. None of those videos were comprised entirely of footage from the film, they were all shot separately as part of the promotional strategy. You never had so many music videos shot separately for songs from a film, at least back then.
The final thing was the way in which the trailer was cut. Akshat Verma: Contrary to what we have now, it was a really progressive Censor Board. Aamir had two productions releasing that year: Dhobi Ghat and Peepli Live. You can take the swear word out. Aamir knew that very soon he was going to go to the Censor Board with Delhi Belly.
Having spoken to them like that, he already created this impression of being a responsible producer. For Delhi Belly , he was very clear that he wanted an A rating with no cuts. This is what the film is. God bless him. Akshat Verma: There were so many people who told Aamir to abandon the film after it was made. Reminder Successfully Set!
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Go to movie details. Users' Rating. Delhi Belly is a fine example of how the brightest and the boldest, when they pool in their talent, can create a film that is guaranteed to give you your money's worth. The diamonds have to be delivered to a local gangster, Vijay Raaz.
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