AI generated summary, newsroom reviewed
Before orchestrating high-altitude aerial operations at 16,000 feet, Abhijeet Singh Parmar and Mehboob Pal Singh Brar operated in a radically different cinematic universe. Fresh off other grounded, intimate world-builders like Gullak and Panchayat, the duo behind Feel Good Films — along with their collaborators — spent four and a half years engineering what is arguably Indian streaming’s most technically ambitious production to date: Operation Safed Sagar.
Mounting a high-budget military action series for Netflix wasn't initially on their cards. But that changed when co-creator Kushal Srivastava, a former Indian Air Force officer of six years, shared a script he had carried since 2018 about the Golden Arrows squadron during the 1999 Kargil War.
What emerged from that was an unprecedented look inside the human mechanics of fighter pilots that Abhijeet and Mehboob discovered. "I saw a really unseen world,” says Abhijeet, co-creator and showrunner. “We knew we had to make it and give it our all," adds Mehboob, co-producer.
After interviewing nearly 60 veterans and piecing together a 100-page pitch document detailing everything from photo-recon spotters to Pakistan’s internal military dynamics, Netflix greenlit the project development in just two weeks, with Oni Sen attached to direct.
The show starred Siddharth, Jimmy Shergill, Adil Hussain, Manu Rishi Chadha, Vinay Pathak, Abhay Verma, Arnav Bhasin, Mihir Ahuja, Taaruk Raina, Amrita Bagchi, Dia Mirza and Prajakta Koli.
In an interview with THR India, Abhijeet and Mehboob deconstruct the sheer scale, military authenticity, and relentless technical obsession behind the making of the show, and reveal the jaw-dropping numbers and engineering feats that defined the series, co-produced by Sanjay Routray and Sarita Pati.
The Unseen Sky
Building an authentic Air Force drama required unlearning standard Hindi cinema tropes. In 2023, Abhijeet and his writing team — Sandeep Jain, Nikhil Ravi, and Barun Kashyap — embarked on an unheard-of three-week research recce across military bases and high-altitude battlefields.
“We realised, among a lot of other things, that not all Air Force briefings happen in hangars just because we want to see cool jets,” Abhijeet says. “They have dedicated briefing rooms. Their houses are really sarkari government houses, and we should shoot there.”
Instead of constructing sets, the production shot inside actual officers' quarters across Air Force bases, from a flight commander’s house to a COO’s residence.
22 MiGs and Real Air Force Sorties
When it came to the aerial machinery, practical realism took precedence over digital shortcuts. The team had 22 MiG-21 jets at their disposal on ground at the Nal Air Force Station in Bikaner for an intensive 19-day schedule.
“MiGs were phasing out, so we had to shoot in a certain way,” Mehboob explains, adding that every takeoff and landing captured in the show features actual Indian Air Force aviators flying sorties (a short flight) for the camera.
For cockpit sequences shoot on the ground, the lead actors were strapped directly into real MiG-21s. “The actors sat inside the MiGs. They are probably the last people to sit inside MiGs and shoot!" Abhijeet adds.
During early production meetings, the team wrestled with how to recreate the freezing heights of Kargil. The production designer Meghna Gandhi (who also did Rocket boys) proposed bringing in specialised artificial snow on Mumbai soundstages.
“We had two or three very intense discussions with the VFX team... saying, ‘Do we really want to do this?'" Parmar recalls. “We’d almost cracked this real fake snow on which actors could walk and feel footsteps.”
Then Mehboob killed the idea with a single sentence.
“Mehboob in the room suddenly says, ‘But yaar, woh muh se vapour nahi aayega toh kaisa lagega?’ (If we don’t see breath vapour coming out of their mouths, how will it look?). That got us down to zero,” Abhijeet laughs. “Then Mehboob did this to himself — he was making sangars (small lookout posts) at 13,000 to 16,000 feet for us.”
Shooting in real sub-zero temperatures at extreme altitudes brought severe physical constraints. To shoot high-resolution 8K background plates, the crew operated a heavy-lift Octocopter drone. In the freezing mountain air, its battery life dropped precipitously.
“At those heights, it could only fly for three minutes per battery,” Parmar says, like an IMAX camera, which, once it starts to roll, you have three minutes to get the shot.
To execute 15 complex flying sequences across 3,000 VFX shots and 1,200 artists, the producers hired German VFX supervisor Falk Büttner a full year before the director even joined. Falk brought a deeply personal obsession to the set.
“When he was 17, he wanted to be a MiG-21 pilot, but he couldn't get through because he was too tall. He knew everything about MiG-21s. He was so excited that life had come full circle for him," Abhijeet reveals.
The production spent six to eight months building a hyper-precise MiG-21 cockpit and eventually shot it at Chitrakoot Studio in Mumbai. The cockpit fabrication happened at the Production Design Construction Space hired by production.
The rig was mounted on an automated hydraulic base synced via Unreal Engine directly to pre-visualisation animatics crafted by different VFX vendors who also did the final CGI for the show.
“This is the first time the lighting and hydraulics were automated and connected via Unreal Engine to the pre-viz,” Abhijeet explains. “The hydraulic would take the right turn at the right time, perfectly synced. All the actors did every flying scene in one go, memorising their cues while seeing real-time CGI comps on a monitor."
To protect the visual effects team from standard industry crunch, the production flipped the traditional editing workflow on its head. Netflix instituted a dedicated VFX editor on set to handle real-time previs edits alongside live production. More crucially, the producers locked the flying sequences even before the full episode offline edits were finalised.
"More often than not, you are only left with three months after the final offline is locked. They allowed us to lock the flying sequences specifically even before the episode edit was locked... so they were getting ample time to work over a single shot and do more layers on that same shot," Mehboob says.
Spanning 115 days of principal photography across 11 cities and 105 locations, Operation Safed Sagar features nearly 200 speaking parts.
“If we had anyone who had star tantrums on this show, we wouldn't have been able to make it. Siddharth and Jimmy [Sheirgill] didn't change their look for over a year. That is Siddharth’s real mustache, that is Jimmy sir’s real beard. Even for a patch shoot, Jimmy sir said, ‘Wait 15 days, I will grow my beard again.’ Vinay [Pathak] sir actually shaved his head," Abhijeet reveals.
For Abhijeet and Mehboob, bringing the show to the finish line demanded four and a half years of relentless, nocturnal discipline.
“I wouldn't see my wife and kids,” Abhijeet admits. “They’d leave for school at eight in the morning and come back at five. There came a time when I was coming home at four or five in the morning, getting up at nine, and working again till four. I did two or three weeks of that and had a health scare.”
For Mehboob, managing post-production meant navigating endless 36-hour crunch windows to protect the VFX timeline, relying on a fiercely dedicated young crew. “You feel immensely fortunate as a producer to have people so invested after working on something for so long,” he reflects.
Looking back on the scale they pulled off, the disbelief remains palpable. “I was watching the final mix of episode five a few weeks ago and suddenly it hit me that we actually did this,” Mehboob concludes. “But I was never scared of doing it.”