The Indian crowd were just marvellous. We... whenever we had a big crowd scene we’d have perhaps a couple of hundred, and we'd call... actors from Bombay, extras, and they would be called front-liners. And they had all the best costumes. And then behind them in the background were the local people who were coming in on a daily basis and they were just provided with water for... for the day. And they... they would come there and sit for hours and hours. And then further away from where... further away where we went shooting, there would be hundreds, sometimes thousands of local people watching us work from a distance. I mean they couldn't see very much but they just sat there all day. And... didn't cause us any trouble although we always had a lot of police with us, you know, to keep control in case there were any problems. But it was just extraordinary how... how people would want to be there and just be present and... watching this re-enactment of the founder of the nation, their great leader.

The day before we... or the first day of shooting it was, we had a special ceremony, a religious ceremony conducted by a Hindu priest in which the film was blessed and we were all garlanded with marigolds to wish the film success. Of course it worked, it was a success, and it was an extraordinary scene on the first day.