The Reincarnation of Akshay Kumar

Sometimes all it takes is a great poster. After producer Rohan Sippy and writer Shridhar Raghavan took a photo of Akshay Kumar and made him into a samurai, Kumar was so humored by their pitch that he signed onto the project immediately -- no script, no story, just the promise of making the first ever martial arts Bollywood film, set in China. 

The first Hindi film backed by Warner Brothers Pictures (and only the third Bollywood co-production from a Hollywood studio, after Sony's Saawariya and Disney's Roadside Romeo), Chandni Chowk to China was given a large budget and more access, which allowed them more license for imagination. Let's not film on a fake soundstage in India. Let's actually shoot on the Great Wall of China. Let's not get just any martial arts choreographer. Let's get Dee Dee Ku, the stunt coordinator on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon who works regularly with Jet Li and Stephen Chow. And let's not get some Indian actor with a fake Chinese accent to play the bad guy. Let's get Gordon Liu from 36th Chamber of Shaolin to crash through a shattered window, jump off the balcony of an opera house, and ruthlessly assasinate his minions with a top hat.

While the Chandni Chowk to China team might not have started out with a concrete script, they had the ideal actor to build a Bollywood/kung fu story around. Before pursuing an acting career, Akshay Kumar trained in judo, taekwondo, and karate in Thailand, and he was working as a martial arts instructor in Bombay when a student suggested he get into modeling. He broke into the Bollywood film industry as an action star, making a series of Khiladi films: Khiladi, Main Khiladi Tu Anari, Sabse Bada Khiladi, Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi, Mr. and Mrs. Khiladi, International Khiladi, and most recently parodying himself in Om Shanti Om with The Return of Khaladi, almost a decade later. 

In the past few years, Kumar has been getting attention for his comedy films (Heyy Babyy, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Welcome) as well as his transnational collaborations (his record-breaking megahit Singh is Kinng featured a bhangra-rap collaboration with Snoop Dogg). Chandni Chowk to China allows Kumar to bring all of these experiences together: action, comedy, and cross-cultural sensibility. The background of CC2C's main character Sidhu is modeled after Kumar's biography. Sidhu is a vegetable cutter from Chandni Chowk who dreams of being a hero; Kumar made a living as a chef in Bangkok before becoming a Bollywood star. The original title of the film, Made in China, was changed to Chandni Chowk to China, because Kumar wanted to pay homage to the busy marketplace Chandni Chowk in his hometown of Delhi. But most important for Kumar was to capture the essence of the martial arts genre.

"I'm not a great martial arts fan," admits director Nikhil Advani (Kal Ho Naa Ho). "I had seen 36th Chamber of Shaolin, I've seen all of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan's films... but I wouldn't go out of my way to go to a DVD library and pick up a martial arts film." However, after Advani signed on to direct CC2C, Kumar was intent on catching him up. With over 300 martial arts films in his DVD collection, Kumar forced Advani to come to his place every single day at 6am to watch kung fu flicks.

As a result, Chandni Chowk to China is littered with kung fu philsophy ("Don't be afraid of 10,000 moves practiced one time. Be afraid of the one move practiced 10,000 times") and it's a wild mashup of all the great scenes in martial arts films over the years: the epic training sequences, drunken fight scenes, the tuxedoed gangs, the scaling of walls, the triggering of pressure points to conquer body and nature.

The Hindi film industry often gets a bad rap for copying from other sources (even the term "Bollywood" enrages some of its stars, as it insinuates they're a mockup of Hollywood). But Bollywood excels in the art (and comedy) of homage. There's a skill to the winking gesture, a humility involved in paying tribute to films and traditions of the past. When developing the script to Chandni Chowk to China, screenwriter Raghavan was influenced by two Ramesh Sippy productions: 1975's Sholay, itself inspired by Akira Kurusawa's Seven Samurai, and Seeta Aur Geeta, which is where he got the twins-separated-at-birth storyline (both played here by the beautiful Deepika Padukone.)

Another grand tribute is the film's title musical number, set to the song "Chandni Chowk to China." It takes us on a journey through China's history, starting with an homage to Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower, with its grandiose Forbidden City set and extravagant costumes; moving to a sleek tribute to Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, in which they shot the 1930s Shanghai-style dance sequences on the exact same set as Lee's 2007 film; and ending with a modern-day breakdancing sequence, capturing the confident energy of China's hip-hop youth. 

The fun of the film is watching Akshay Kumar take all these influences and make them his own. The martial arts scenes are playful, as they're often integrated with Bollywood-style choreography. ("I can't dance," jokes Kumar. "When I dance, it looks like I'm fighting. It's more like aerobics.") For Sidhu's cartoonish demeanor, Kumar also channeled Jerry, of Tom & Jerry fame, which has been a long-time influence for Kumar. (While Tom's action scenes are for the purposes of catching Jerry to eat him, Akshay Kumar has oddly enough taken a lot of these daredevil stunts and put them in his action films over the years.) Physical character traits are borrowed as well. Kumar created Sidhu's goofy walk by mimicking his makeup artist, and to perfect Sidhu's arm-flinging tantrums during the training montages, all Kumar had to do was imitate his six year-old son.

One of the biggest perks that comes with the opening of global markets is the opportunities to work with international talents. In addition to juggling Indian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Thai crews, they cast actor Roger Yuan, a student of Chuck Norris and Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, to play kung fu master and Hindi-speaking father figure, Chiang. They sent the script to "master killer" Gordon Liu, thinking there was no way he'd agree to play Hojo -- only to be shocked and ecstatic when Liu called and said he was on board.

"It means a great deal," says Kumar, who cites Gordon Liu as the reason he wanted to learn martial arts in the first place.

"I was a waiter and a cook working in Thailand, and I had three posters behind where I was working," he says. "One was Sri Devi, a very big Indian actress. Then I had Sylvester Stallone. And then I had the 36th Chamber of Shaolin photograph [with Gordon Liu on it].... The surprise of my life [is that] I have worked with all three of them.... I just sometimes keep on thinking, why didn't I keep more posters? Maybe that was a very magical wall."

When it opened worldwide on January 15th, 2009, Chandni Chowk to China boasted the highest US screen release ever, at 130 screens. Western critics (unaccustomed to the typical length of a Bollywood movie and not given a standard intermission at the press screenings) haven't been able to process the film's unapologetic indulgence, and Indian critics, who are having fun with their cheeky headlines ("The great fall of Chandni Chowk to China"), perhaps haven't taken to it either. But Chandni Chowk to China is really for the global fan of Bollywood who's willing to forgo logic and happily go along for the ride as the lovable doofus finds redemption. It's for someone who loves that Deepika and her twin have a Chinese father, loves that Kumar spends a lot of the film talking to a potato, and loves that a film crew finally realized the brilliance of shooting a martial artist doing ab work while hanging off of the Great Wall of China.