“Kurbaan was hard work. Period. In fact, the Philadelphia schedule was plain hell. It wasn’t anything like a picnic shooting for the film,” says Saif Ali Khan to a leading newspaper. The actor claimed that shooting for the film with real life love Kareena Kapoor was one of the hardest shoots he ever endured. The film is predominantly shot in Philadelphia during the winter which meant that besides having to wear layers of clothing, the team had to battle the bitter cold. “It gets dark there at 4 p.m. itself. Moreover, it’s so cold and at minus 10 degrees it can actually get really depressing. Since we were shooting in sync sound, it was extremely difficult to get the pitch and tone right while delivering our dialogues,” Khan adds.
Additionally, it was during the November Terror Attacks in Mumbai that the crew was shooting for the film in the U.S. Hearing the dreaded news added more tension and made it harder for the cast to work, “Because of that, it was so difficult to concentrate on the film’s shoot. Thankfully, Bebo was there with me at that time but still both of us were very depressed,” Khan explains.
And to make things worse, the couple had to wear the layers back in Mumbai when they were shooting all for “continuity purposes” in the grueling heat. That wasn’t the last of the exhausting experience associated with Kurbaan, “We were shooting in a tube and that’s anything but fun,” he remembers. “We had to shoot a subway sequence but being in a tube for hours at a stretch is like being in an underground prison. Really, it is very disorienting. Who says shooting for a film is like being in a picnic? Kurbaan certainly wasn’t one.”
