Inside the Making of India’s Greatest Cricket Films: From 'Lagaan' to '83' and 'Iqbal'

In the scorching summer of 2000, a crowd of nearly 10,000 people assembled in Bhuj, in Gujarat’s Kutch district, to film the climactic scene of Lagaan (2001). A motley group of actors, led by superstar Aamir Khan, were playing cricketers on a parched land transformed into a makeshift pitch. To keep the crowd engaged and not let their restlessness derail the shoot, director Ashutosh Gowariker came up with a plan: for Khan, dressed in his attire of a villager from 1893, to take the microphone and sing “Aati Kya Khandala”.

The crowd erupted in a frenzy of dance, screams and jubilation. Gowariker and his crew captured the hysteria on camera, and that footage became the reaction shots of villagers celebrating their team’s defeat of the British in the film’s final cut.

It was a quintessentially Indian enterprise — the country’s two greatest passions, cricket and cinema, aligning in perfect harmony.

Lagaan was a game-changer. It gave Indian filmmakers the confidence to write and produce stories around cricket, leading to films like the Shreyas Talpade starrer Iqbal; Jannat, headlined by Emraan Hashmi; the Sushant Singh Rajput–led biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story; the Sonam Kapoor–Dulquer Salmaan vehicle The Zoya Factor; Kabir Khan’s 83; the Karan Johar–backed Mr. & Mrs. Mahi; and Test, the 2025 Netflix drama, featuring Nayanthara, R. Madhavan and Siddharth.

The Logistics

The folklore around the making of Lagaan, which was nominated for the best foreign language film at the 2002 Academy Awards, is so dense that it has led to Lancy Fernandes and Satyajit Bhatkal’s book The Spirit of Lagaan (2002), as well as Bhatkal’s documentary Madness in the Desert (2003), which chronicled how the team made the impossible film possible. “It was a risky film from every possible angle. It was over three and a half hours long, shot in sync sound, we were showing a village and the shoot lasted six months!” recalls chartered accountant (CA) Bimal Parekh, who has been associated with Khan for over three decades.

Parekh was present on location when the crew shot with 10,000 extras. The CA says it was a “particularly crazy day”, as the arrangement was that the team would pay everyone cash on the spot. But there was a catch: Why would local villagers, who had never seen a film crew before, trust them?

“They wouldn’t take cheques; all of them wanted cash. We had to pay 10,000 people and the problem was: What if the same person comes back, joins the queue and takes extra money? We thought we could mark the fingers of the people we’ve paid with ink, like what happens in voting. But what if some people who were not even part of the shoot enter, get inked, and take money? It was a logistical nightmare to execute! So, we came up with the idea of group leaders. Each had to bring in 400 or 200 people; we would mark the team leader, pay him, who would then distribute it. The fee was `100, and we also obviously gave them food on the day of the shoot,” Parekh says.

The Writing

For screenwriter Sumit Arora, a lifelong cricket enthusiast, the opportunity to pen cricket-based projects, like Ranveer Singh’s 83 and the Anil Kapoor-backed 2018 Netflix series Selection Day, was a dream come true, as he channelled his passion for the sport into his craft.

“Selection Day involved researching the cricket scene in Mumbai, so we visited every major ground that had folklore around it, including Azad Maidan, where Sachin Tendulkar used to play. The focus was on harsher realities, but 83 was a different process because it was such a huge moment in India’s history, which generations know — even if they hadn’t been born when we won the World Cup,” Arora says.

The screenwriter recalls meeting the cricketing legends several times, listening to their stories, observing their personalities, marking their quirks and reading up on the material provided by director Kabir Khan before he started penning the dialogues of the film.

“The challenge was how to tell a story cohesively that is already known to people. Once we figured out interesting behind-the-scenes moments of the 1983 World Cup, we had to ensure we represented the characters in such a way that made people feel they knew the characters inside out. The process was to constantly interact with them and get to know their [personal] accounts of the event. That’s why the task was to stay honest, because it has been their lived experience; you can’t bluff it. They were happy with the film because we were able to stay true to the stories they narrated to us,” he adds.

On Set

In Bhatkal’s Madness in the Desert, Gowariker recalls how producers, including Aamir Khan himself, dissuaded him from making a “rule-breaking” film like Lagaan. The only way then was to rebel against the system that had conveniently declared that there was no way a film with the backdrop of cricket, set in history, about oppression and taxes, where the hero’s look has been completely changed, can work.

The film’s budget ballooned to over ₹20 crore from its modest ₹12 crore start as the film battled multiple scheduling delays, with Gowariker suffering from a slipped disc and pulling off the unbelievable: directing while lying down on his bed, which was placed next to the monitor.

Hardships, physical or emotional, have been a constant in the making of a cricket-based film. Actor Shreyas Talpade, who shot to fame with Iqbal as the cricket-obsessed deaf boy from a remote Indian village who plays for the Indian cricket team, got married a day before he shot for the Nagesh Kukunoor directorial.

“I got married, and the next morning I flew to Hyderabad. My wife was in Mumbai with my parents while I was shooting. But mentally, I had to be in a space where I needed to be strong. It was a big opportunity for me, and I had to mute everything else,” Talpade says. The film, which bagged the National Film Award for best film on other social issues, put Talpade on the map as an actor to watch out for.

Talpade could only do it with an “intensely exhausting” training routine of almost a month: He would wake up at four in the morning, head to the ground by 5:30 for his warm-up exercises, followed by his training in bowling and then some relaxing exercises. “I would train under Vincent Vinay Kumar, who put me in a nice mental setup to take care of my body. By 8:30, we would wrap up, and I’d have my breakfast. Then, I’d head to the stable to be with the buffaloes, as Iqbal would use them as his ‘team players’. We had to identify the right buffalo that would be friendly with me! Then post-lunch, I would practise my sign language, and then around 4:30, I’d do my second round of blowing practice, and in the evening, there’d be script rehearsals with Nagesh. By 8:30 I’d finally hit the bed.”

The drill of prepping for Iqbal helped Talpade when he did another cricket film 17 years later, Kaun Pravin Tambe? (see page 128), in which he played a real-life cricketer, the right-arm, leg-spin bowler who made his Indian Premier League (IPL) debut at the age of 41. “Iqbal was a pace bowler, so we had to do everything keeping in mind that when I bowl on screen it should look like I deserve to play for the team,” the actor says.

Talpade was 30 years old when he shot Iqbal, but for Kaun Pravin Tambe? the actor had to showcase his journey from the age of 20 till 42. “By the time I did my second cricket film, the Iqbal experience came to my rescue. I knew that I had to be mentally and physically strong because it was an extremely challenging film,” Talpade adds.

Nailing the Shot

Cinematographer Viraj Singh Gohil had neither been a cricket fan nor had he ever shot a project with cricket as the backdrop. But everything changed when his long-time friend S. Sashikanth asked him to come on board for his directorial debut Test. The sport drama, headlined by Nayanthara, R. Madhavan, and Siddharth, recently released on Netflix.

Gohil, who has shot titles like the Amazon Prime Video series Sweet Karam Coffee, the 2021 Mani Ratnam–backed Netflix anthology Navarasa and the 2018 documentary Harmony with AR Rahman,

said filming cricket portions of Test was the most challenging.

“The idea was to make it seem like everything was unfolding in real time and not make it look like hyper-cinematic Bollywood-ised cricket with cameras flying around. It should feel like how we are used to watching cricket — you turn on the TV and watch Siddharth play,” the cinematographer says.

Gohil’s prep included watching cricket matches in stadiums as well as on TV, figuring out various camera placements, choosing the right lens and talking to cricket experts. The crew hired the entire DY Patil stadium to execute their camera test before the shoot, which took place at MA Chidambaram Stadium, Chennai, right before the IPL season. “Each camera position had to be the same as you see on a TV broadcast. So we hired mid-wicket cameramen, a cameraman who would only follow the ball and other cameramen placed to capture strategic angles. You can’t have 25 cameras because it would go over budget, but we got seven cameras for the shoot,” Gohil says.

The crew didn’t want to shoot it in green screen, because it looked bad. These were big cameras, with a lot of cables, so to move one camera would take at least three hours. Gohil adds, “What we did instead was we kept rotating the audience for the frame we wanted them to be in. That gave a 360-degree feel and the illusion that the stadium was packed! We prepped for a year for a three-day shoot, which was part of a two-and-a-half-hour film! It sounds crazy to go to this extent, but that’s the only way to make something you are passionate about."

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