Hollywood actor Sam Neill recently spoke about his time shooting in India, and other memories associated with the country. Neill came to India back in the 90s to shoot Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’, which introduced him to the worlds of Mumbai and Jodhpur. Speaking in an interview Neill said, “I made a film in the country, and when you say India to me, all the time spent making it comes back to me so vividly. It was an amazing experience for me to be there. I found it overwhelming.”
The 74-year-old said, “It was beautiful, but it was too beautiful. It was noisy, but it was too noisy. It was colourful, but it was too colourful. All my senses were overloaded the whole time I was in the country.” Calling India an “extraordinary place”, Neill said in the interview, “We stayed at the enormous palace of Maharaja of Jodhpur, the part which is a hotel. It was the most beautiful place.”
“But it was the evenings on the terrace, overlooking the plains in one direction in Jodhpur, and in the other direction, the distant horizons of that extraordinary arid land with that lovely blue sky changing colour as the sun goes down,” Neill described.
Elaborating his myriad of experiences in India, the actor said, “I still get anxious when I think of hurtling down Indian roads in one of those sorts of 50s Morris taxis, dodging people carrying things, weaving around cars. I would have to close my eyes in cars because every minute we seem to be close to death. But in India, it seemed completely normal.”
“After eight or ten weeks, I got on the plane and just breathed a sigh of relief. I thought to myself ‘it is the most extraordinary experience of my life’. But I just needed a little calm,” he said.
But Neill has an Indian connection. “The generation on my mother’s side was a part of the Indian army, so we go way back. We have a lot of family connections there. In some way, it’s somewhere in my DNA. India felt like I was going home,” he said.
Neill is all set to bring back Dr Alan Grant in the upcoming release of ‘Jurassic Park: Dominion’.
