Chennai Express

Chennai Express (2013)

Ready... Steady... Po!

Rahul embarks on a journey to a small town in Tamil Nadu to fulfill the last wish of his grandfather: to have his ashes immersed in the Holy water of Rameshwaram. En route, he meets a woman hailing from a unique family down South. As they find love through this journey in the exuberant lands of South India, an unanticipated drive awaits them.

Date of release
2013-08-08
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (416)
Runtime
2h 21m
Genres
Romance, Comedy, Action
Director
Rohit Shetty

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Zee Cine Award for Best Film

Chennai Express is a 2013 Indian Hindi-language action comedy film directed by Rohit Shetty and produced by UTV Motion Pictures and Red Chillies Entertainment. The film stars Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan with Nikitin Dheer and Sathyaraj in supporting roles. It revolves around Rahul Mithaiwala, a businessman who accidentally boards the eponymous train and journeys from Mumbai to Rameswaram with the daughter of an influential crime boss. The film, primarily in Hindi, contains significant Tamil dialogue due to its setting in Rameswaram.

Production

Rohit Shetty had originally planned to team up with Shah Rukh Khan for a remake of the 1982 film, Angoor. After the 2011 blockbuster Singham, Shetty had begun writing the script of the film but left it half-finished. The script of Chennai Express was ready for Khan as a back-up, because of the difficulty of obtaining the actor's filming dates.

Khan was the first actor to be approached with the script and was the first lead actor to be signed for the film. Rohit Shetty stated that despite the title, Khan would not play a South Indian in the film. The casting of the lead heroine was the subject of much press speculation; Kareena Kapoor, Asin and Deepika Padukone were rumoured to be involved.

Sathyaraj was cast to play the role of Padukone's character's father, making his debut in Bollywood. Actress Priyamani was signed in January 2013 for an item number in the film replacing Nayanthara; both the actresses would eventually go on to star alongside Khan in Jawan.

Filming on the project began at Mehboob Studio in Mumbai on 5 October 2012. Additional filming was done at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus with a minimal crew. Stills of the lead actor were unofficially released in mid-October 2012. In November 2012, the cast and crew went to Goa to begin filming the scenes set there. Vasco da Gama railway station was used to portray as Kalyan Junction railway station.

In January 2013, a shoot was supposedly scheduled to take place in Ooty, but since Khan felt that Ooty was too far from Mumbai, several locations from Ooty were reconstructed on the outskirts of Panchgani in Wai by the art director Narendra Ruharikar. It took over 40 days and ₹ 15 million to build the required sets. Filming in Wai took the entire month of March 2013.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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