Sports coordinators on film sets have juggle many hats, from training, choreography to even casting, brand tie-ups

What kind of food is served on a film set? Who picked out the paintings for the hero’s bedroom? What does an Executive Producer do? Karishma Upadhyay’s monthly column Bollywood Inside could attempt to answer these and other questions you might have about all things Bollywood but were too shy to ask.

*

As the winter set in 2015, members of the Indian women’s wrestling team were attending a training camp in Lucknow in preparation for the 2016 Rio Olympics. A few hundred kilometers away, in suburban Mumbai, a small group of actresses were being trained in the techniques and intricacies of wrestling by Kripa Shankar Patel Bishnoi, a Commonwealth Games bronze medalist, Arjuna Medal awardee, and coach for the Indian female wrestling team.

Bishnoi was roped in by director Nitesh Tiwari, who was working on Dangal, a story about a father and former Indian national wrestling champion [played by Aamir Khan], who trains his two young daughters to be world-class wrestlers.

More from Entertainment

'Border 2' Movie Review: Sunny Deol, Varun Dhawan, Diljit Dosanjh and Ahaan Shetty’s film thrives on pure nostalgia; that’s it Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz's DJ reveals the inside story of Victoria Beckham's 'inappropriate' dance: 'She goes onto the stage and...'

When Tiwari started working on the film, it was imperative for him to find an expert who would help him make all the wrestling in the film ’look extremely authentic.’ “And we were also looking for somebody who was an expert in women’s wrestling and could train the girls. Kripa Shankar sir had all the right credentials,” says Tiwari. Bishnoi was credited with ‘wrestling choreography and coach’ in the film.

While the former sportsman and current coach went back to his day job after the filming of Dangal wrapped, there are those like Rob Miller and Aimee McDaniel, who help directors around the world film sports scenes, no matter the screen-length, with accuracy and authenticity.  

Sports coordination is a fairly new department in Bollywood. With the rise in films that revolve around sports, one that is here to stay.

Within this, their primary role is similar to a dance or action choreographer. In Mary Kom for instance, the climax fight at the Amateur World Boxing Championship is against a German opponent. Seconds before the bout is to start, Mary (Priyanka Chopra) receives news about her child’s medical condition, and is distraught and distracted. Her opponent takes advantage of this, raining blows and knocking her down. Until Kom gets up and fights back. In the script, this is how the sequence would have been written but it was up to Miller and his team at Reel Sports to break it down – what kinds of blows and how many punches does the opponent land, Kom’s reaction to them, how she falls, and the punch that wins her the bout and the championship.        

The likes of Miller do not just choreograph the sporting action but offer a more holistic approach. “We also help train the actors. Like for Mary Kom, I brought in Christy Halbert, who was the first female American Olympic coach, to train Priyanka and be our boxing advisor. In some cases, like Rebound [a basketball film starring Martin Lawrence], we were involved from the script level, tweaking it to make sure the sport feels authentic. In Half Girlfriend [starring Shraddha Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor], we helped with the NBA connection [that included not just training the leads for the film’s 15-minute basketball sequence but was also a sponsorship deal].” And then there is casting.  

While in most cases, especially in Bollywood, the main cast is locked, Miller has helped cast other sports persons playing against and around the protagonists. For Miracle, a Kurt Russell film about the US men’s ice hockey team that won the gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics, he did a six-city tour around North America to find players who looked similar to the sports men in real life. “Much like 83, the matches in Miracle were very well known so we had to find not just someone who was athletic but also looked like the players of then.” Miracle won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award in 2004. Closer home, for Shimit Amin’s Chak De! India, he cast all girls who played on the opposing teams.  

Miller is a rare Sports Coordinator working in Bollywood today. The 58-year-old North Carolinian played university-level American football and also dabbled in track and field, and boxing. After a Master’s in Health and Human Performances, he started coaching college and pro athletes. A side gig resulted in him being hired as a sports planning manager in charge of nine sports at the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games which, in turn, led to working with NBC’s digital sports division during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. In the two decades that he has been a sports coordinator, Miller and his team have worked on over 25 films, that also includes Hindi ones like Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Student of the Year, The Zoya Factor, and most recently 83. And coming up are Ajay Devgn’s Maidaan, which is inspired by the Indian national football team coach and manager Syed Abdul Rahim, and Jersey, that stars Shahid Kapur.  

For Gold, director Reema Kagti roped in sports coordinator Aimee McDonald, whose credits include Invictus, Million Dollar Arm, and The Longest Yard, to bring to screen a formative moment in Indian identity when we won the first medal in field hockey at the 1948 Olympics as an independent country. McDonald, who grew up in the US playing soccer, basketball, and volleyball, was aware of hockey as a sport but knew little else. She relied heavily on Australian Olympian and former coach of the Indian national field hockey men’s team, Michael Nobbs, for research into the style and rules of the game from the 1930-40s when the film is set.

“There wasn’t a lot of footage of games during that period, so we made a conscious effort, with Reema’s blessing, to combine today’s athletes and their speed, and choreograph a similar style of game play to the 1930s and 1940s. We had to ramp up the physicality and some of the action to keep audiences engaged in the sports action sequences,” McDonald told Cinestaan in an interview.

The number of films revolving around sports has increased manifold in the last few years but there are not enough sports coordinators, so filmmakers continue to take the route that Tiwari did for Dangal – have an expert onboard for training, technical sports guidance, and choreography but have an action director like Sham Kaushal for the actual shoot. “All the wrestling choreography was done by Kripa Shankar sir. For each fight, we’d explain to him what we wanted, and he’d show the moves. And there is a lot of wrestling in the film from Aamir sir’s opening sequence in the office with Vivan Bhatena to younger Geeta’s first fight in the dangal to Aamir sir’s fight with Geeta and all the montages to the Commonwealth Games. I wanted each bout to look different, and also dramatic enough that the audience immediately knows how the fight is progressing,” explains Tiwari.

Another challenge for Bishnoi was that the film features both mud and mat wrestling, and the rules and techniques for both are quite different. Also, to make the bouts immersive for the audience, especially the ones during Commonwealth Games, they were filmed in real time and with long cuts.

Before the actors started shooting the wrestling portions of the film, Bishnoi had choreographed all sequences with real wrestlers. Once the moves where locked, Kaushal and cinematographer Satyajit ‘Setu’ Pande stepped in to decide how the sequences should be best shot for maximum impact on the big screen. This meant that once the actors got on the set, everyone knew exactly what needed to be done. Bishnoi was also involved in picking the girls who were cast as opponents. “We had auditions around the country to choose wrestlers who were technically so sound that they didn’t injure the actors. But once they would start the bout, there were times when the wrestlers would forget that the girls weren’t real sportswomen,” Bishnoi recalls.

Author of Parveen Babi: A Life, Karishma Upadhyay has been writing about movies and movie stars for almost two decades. On Twitter, she goes by @karishmau.