Sholay 1975
Almost as time-consuming were the sequences of Radha extinguishing the lamps while Jai played his harmonica and watched. These sequences establish the gradual, wordless bonding between the widow and the thief - the sympathy and admiration slowly turning into love. Capturing the right mood was critical. These were two sequences, only about a minute each in the final film, and it took twenty days to shoot them. Ramesh and Divecha decided to do the scenes in 'magic hour', a cinema term for the time between sunset and night. The light that falls during magic hour is dreamlike in its warm golden hue. The director and cinemtograher wanted specifically the velvety dusk which arrives at the tail end of the golden hue. A shadowy darkness precedes nightfall, but it is still light enough to show the surrounding silhouettes. Essentially, they had only a few minutes to capture the shot. The preparations for the shot would begin after lunch. The lights and the camera set-up would be in place well before time. At around five in the evening they would rehearse the shot and the camera movements.Then between six and six-thirty as the sun started to set, there was total pandemonium. Everyone ran around shouting, trying to get the shot before darkness. sometimes they would get one shot, sometimes two and very rarely with great difficulty, a third re-take. But there was never any time to change the set-up. Ramesh wouldn't settle for anything less than perfection. Invariably there was always some mess-up. The sun set earlier than expected, a light man made a mistake, the trolly movement wasn't right, some object was lying where it shouldn't have been. There were times when Jaya lost her cool: 'Ramesh, no one can see me,' she would say. 'It's a long shot, no viewer on the planet is going to be able to see the mistakes in continuity.' The answer always was: 'No, no, one more take.' Ramesh dressed each frame. The Lady-of-the-lamps shot became a kind of a joke. It took several schedules to get it right.
In fact, in terms of time taken, each sequence seemed to compete with the next. Ahmed, the blind Imam's son (played by Sachin), for instance, took seventeen days to die. It was a long and complicated sequence, and originally it also included the actual act of killing: meat is roasting in the foreground; Gabbar points a red-hot skewer at the boy and with a gleeful look tells his gang, 'Isko to bahut tadpa tadpa ke maroonga.' But this never made it to the final cut. Instead, the scene cuts from Gabbar killing an ant to Ahmed's horse carrying his dead body into the village.
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