On a film set, if you are a part of the labour class, the food you get is different; a separate table is set for you. You are not entitled to drink mineral water - Fawzan Husain : Bollywood News

Well known photographer Fawzan Husains very unusual behind-the-scenes look at Bollywood, forms his highly acclaimed exhibition of photographs under the theme Silver Screen, which has been traveling to several cities. IndiaFM talks to the man behind the lens.

What was the germ of the new Silver Screen show?

Bollywood has been on my mind for a while now. Govind Nihalani asked me to take pictures of Dev for a book he was planning. I spent long stretches of time on his shoots. I got to see the movie world in a really close way; how sets are made and destroyed, characters make-up, the role of choreography, I started observing it and I liked what I saw. I needed time to understand how a dream is churned out. The ground reality is quite different, see how shots are taken, how people work, and I am still working on it. I have been shooting on and off, it is difficult to convince specially the big banners to let me hang out on the sets. But I have images from about 20 films that are part of my Silver Screen exhibition.

But this show drove me bonkers. Their lighting is different. After spending days on a set, there is no guarantee that I will get a picture of my liking. I have spent the maximum time working on this show, never sure what I was going to get. Since I was not getting paid, a lot of people wondered what I was doing there. They would call me Still Dada and I realized that the photographer doing the stills on the set does not get the kind of respect due to him.

On a film set, if you are a part of the labour class, the food you get is different; a separate table is set for you. You are not entitled to drink mineral water. There is a clean divide between A class and C class and a photographer is somewhere between the A and C class. If you go on the set as a journalist, you are pampered but you dont get to see the nitty-gritty of how things function. As a Still Dada your table is set away from the stars. There is a great disparity that I saw, understood and learnt. In any case, I wandered around the fringes, I never tried to get close to the actors or stars. I had to remain as aloof as possible to get what I wanted. It was an eye-opener for me and I have tried to deglamorize the whole thing. There is too much glamour associated with Bollywood.

"On a film set, if you are a part of the 'labour' class, the food you get is different; a separate table is set for you. You are not entitled to drink mineral water" - Fawzan Husain