Saif Ali Khan has been rigorously training in the most complex martial arts for his role as a spy in Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod.

Saif’s latest acquisition to amplify the scope of his action scenes will make our other action stars go green with envy. It would certainly disappoint Vivek Oberoi to know that Saif has beaten him into getting the Prince of Persia action director Cedric Proust to do the stunts in Agent Vinod.

Vivek’s producers planned to bring Proust for the sequel to Prince.

Confirming this development Agent Vinod director Sriram Raghavan says, “Yes, Cedric Proust who has done many big Hollywood action films did Saif’s action scenes in Morocco and Afghanistan. We plan to hire another leading action director for Saif’s action scenes in England and an Indian one for the stunts in Delhi. In this way we hope to economize on the budget for action scenes without compromising on the quality of the action”.

Raghavan says too much money is wasted in Hindi films by unnecessarily blowing up cars and filming chase sequences.

Says the director, “Let’s face it. We don’t have the budgets afforded to action scenes in the James Bond and Bourne films. But we can economize on the budget and still give the same caliber of stunts. For instance, instead of a 9-minute car chase we can shoot for the chase for just 4 minutes with the same impact”.

Stunts, says Raghavan, are grossly misused in our films. “We often splurge unnecessarily on action scenes. For example, why do we need to go abroad to shoot action scenes when we have the location and infrastructure right here? In my Johnny Gaddar we needed to shoot an action sequence in a train. We thought of going abroad. Then we settled for India”.

Sriram wonders why recent Bollywood’s action sequences are not spoken about when so much money is spent on them. “When we mention action why do we talk only about the train-robbery sequence in Sholay and the godown fight in Deewaar? We need to stop treating fight sequences with the flamboyance of item songs”.

In Agent Vinod Saif will be doing the most rugged and realistic action.

Explains Raghavan, “Saif plays a spy. His character needs to be trained for all kinds of crises. I want Saif to fight instinctively, not as though his moves have been pre-decided. There will be a lot of the raw guttural bloody stuff”.

– Subhash K. Jha/Sampurn Wire