Ahmed Khan has assembled one of the biggest ensembles in recent memory for his new adventure comedy, Welcome to the Jungle, which is the third instalment of the popular Welcome franchise. While the threequel doesn’t have the OG welcome duo — Anil Kapoor aka Majnu Bhai and Nana Patekar aka Uday Shetty — it boats of a star cast of 34 actors. The filmmaker recently opened up on the logistical challenges of pulling off such a huge ensemble.
“When audiences watch the film, they will only see the 34 characters on screen. But when you look at the breakdown behind the scenes, you realise those characters are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine setting up a shoot of this scale,” said Ahmed. “But here is the real math: beyond the core cast, you have their entourages— usually about five people per star. So, if you calculate 30 actors plus their immediate teams, you are looking at 150 people just on the actors’ side,” added the director
Combine that with 200 crew members, stunt teams, horsemen, and 150-200 background dancers. “So on some days, I was managing anywhere between 700 to 900 people on set,” Ahmed revealed to The Hollywood Reporter India. “Managing our set was less like managing a traditional film shoot and more like organising a massive music concert every single day,” he added.
How much space needed for Welcome to the Jungle set?
The challenge of finding space for 900 people almost every day wasn’t the toughest challenge Ahmed Khan had to encounter. There was also the additional hurdle of managing the cast’s vanity vans. “Imagine setting up a shoot of this scale. We didn’t just need a ground; we had to find two massive, adjacent grounds. Why? Because we needed space to park 50 vanity vans,” pointed out Ahmed.
“We needed additional holding areas for the background actors and cabins for the main unit. Then consider the commute. The actors arrive in their cars, the technicians in theirs, plus separate vehicles for the makeup teams, hair stylists, and personal staff. We were dealing with 200 to 250 cars arriving daily,” added the filmmaker.
Managing a cast of 34 actors
Ahmed Khan admitted that in comparison to handling the “macro logistics”, the “creative challenge” of directing 34 actors turned out to be easier. “The first thing I did in my office was tell my team to get me a massive chart board. I had them pin up photographs of every single actor. It couldn’t just be at the back of my mind; it needed to be right in front of my eyes every day to remind me exactly how many people would be on set,” he recalled.
“Just piecing everyone’s schedules together — trying to lock down even five days from one actor and eight days from another — was a jigsaw puzzle. We had meticulously accumulated everyone’s dates and structured the scenes accordingly,” added Ahmed. However, he maintains that there were no ego clashes between the actors on set. “We had a genuinely wonderful time shooting the film. Of course, bringing that many people together under intense heat, managing strict timelines, sorting dates, setting up the camera frames, and mounting the physical sets took immense effort,” said the director.
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However, last year, when he was in the middle of shooting the film, Ahmed Khan did admit that he had to take care of the actors’ egos since there were so many of them. “It’s a tough job yaar. It’s not easy to manage each actor’s ego, their dates, their personal requirements, their dialogues. It’s not just action and cut today. There’s PR, there are ego massages, there are problems like one actor coming out of van while another doesn’t. Filmmaking is not like K Asif’s anymore, where you just smoke on set, and demand real diamonds instead of pearls. If you make those demands today, you’d be told to go home. If you have to survive today, you’ve to scratch their back so that they scratch yours,” Ahmed said on SCREEN Spotlight.
“To make such a film is not a joke. We had a minimum of 20 actors in a scene, and they went up to 34. We used to say, ‘It’s a less stressful day because there are only 15 actors on set.’ That’s still the full-blown cast of an average film. A lot of the times, we even used to forget that an actor wasn’t supposed to come in that day,” he added, laughing.
Also Read — Welcome To The Jungle advance box office: Akshay Kumar film starts slow, closes in on Rs 1 cr
Who all are in Welcome to the Jungle?
The ensemble cast of Welcome to the Jungle consists of Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Paresh Rawal, Jackie Shroff, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Aftab Shivdasani, Disha Patani, Raveena Tandon, Jacqueline Fernandez, Lara Dutta, Johnny Lever, Rajpal Yadav, Kiku Sharda, Krushna Abhishek, Kiran Kumar, Zakir Hussain, Farida Jalal, Daler Mehendi, Mika Singh, Urvashi Rautela, Yashpal Sharma, Shreyas Talpade, Vindu Dara Singh, and late Pankaj Dheer, among others. It’s slated to release in cinemas on July 26.
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