After his impassioned speech in the Parliament on Tuesday, Omar Abdullah will now be seen in a cameo in this Friday’s release Mission Istanbul. The National Conference leader plays himself in the Apoorva Lakhia film.
“Omar is a school friend and an important future leader of the country. I just called him for this one sequence where we needed a Kashmir perspective. He agreed for the cameo provided we let him speak a bit about the issues concerning Jammu & Kashmir,” says Lakhia whose last release was Shootout at Lokhandwala.
Mission Istanbul explores international terrorism through the eyes of its journalist protagonist. But don’t expect a hard-hitting statement; the tone of the film is as ‘Bollywoodised’ as it gets. Lakhia is quick to point out that his film “is not a preachy, message-based film rather is a hardcore Hindi commercial film”.
The filmmaker has taken live footage of Bin Laden and Bush for the opening credits of the film but for key cinematic sequences he opted for their look-alikes. For film trivia aficionados, Brent Mendenhall—a well known Bush impersonator in late-night comic shows of Jay Leno and David Letterman—is standing in for the US President while Khalil Ahmed is the replica of the Al Qaeda honcho.
There is more reality bites. The entire plot of the film revolves around a fictitious Istanbul-based news channel, Al Johara, which is widely criticised as the mouthpiece of terrorists. Lakhia has also shot outside the picturesque Blue Mosque. “They don’t appreciate film crews shooting the mosque. We got really lucky since we got special permission to shoot songs. That’s a first time for any film,” he says.
Though he terms Mission Istanbul as a “purely fictitious story”, Lakhia admits a lot of research went into getting the context of international terrorism right. Extensive footage has been sourced from Channel 13, BBC, CNN and National Geographic especially with a view to show terrorist camps in Afghanistan. “We couldn’t go wrong with that. We had to create authentic terrorist camps and so we needed a lot of reference,” says Lakhia.
The crew also called in on the White House for footage. “We bought footage from them because we wanted to create Air Force One. That’s another first for a Hindi film,” says the film’s proud maker.
