'Thangalaan' star Daniel Caltagirone on big difference in Indian and Western movie sets: 'There were cows, monkeys moving around'

Thangalaan star Daniel Caltagirone

British actor Daniel Carlatgirone made his acting debut in India with the recently released hit film 'Thangalaan' that also starred Chiyaan Vikram, Parvathy and Malavika Mohanan. Directed by Pa Ranjith, the Tamil film saw Carlatgirone play a parallel lead to Vikram named Lord Clement. The Indian movie set, he experienced, is quiet different from that of what happens on the sets of a western movie. For starters, Carlatgirone was not ready for the noise on the sets once camera starts rolling. Talking to mid-day.com, he revealed that he had to stop a scene in between owing to the chaos. But he soon learnt that it is normal on Tamil cinema set and instead learnt to deal with the new ways of shooting

Daniel Carlatgirone on difference between Indian movie sets and Western movie set

Talking about his initial experience in India, he said, "When I first arrived, I felt like what is going on here! There were hundreds of people running around and in the West when the director says action you can't even hear a pin drop. It's so quiet. If a phone was to go off or someone was to speak, they're in big trouble. What I had to get used to on a Tamil film set was to have 10 phones going off after director said action. There were people talking and hundreds of people standing.

"I remember stopping a scene and saying, 'Could we just have some quiet?' and Ranjit saying, 'Why are you stopping Daniel?' 'What do you mean? There's a cow moving over there and there's a monkey swinging in front of me on a tree. It t was that crazy. It took me about three or four weeks to get into that mindset of pretending that nothing exists. After that, I didn't hear anything. You could have run a train through the set and I wouldn't have seen it because you just retrain yourself."

Daniel also shared that in the West actors are not encouraged to do their stunts due to insurance reasons and therefore he loved the element of danger on Indian movie set. "We're we are wrapped in cotton wool. We're not allowed to do this or that for insurance reasons. You have got to have the stunt team doing all your stunts. Whereas in India, I was doing my own stunts a lot of the time. I mean the stunt team were working with me, but you do your own stuff. I could go off and improvise at a moment's notice. I wish I could bring that across to the West where we are not as risk averse as we are in the West."

What Pa Ranjit told Daniel Carlatgirone before signing him

Daniel took up the role without even reading the script. All it took for him was a conversation with Pa Ranjith. When asked what went down during that conversation, he revealed, "He convinced me that the reason he was speaking to me at all was the fact that I've worked with all these big Hollywood movies and I had an established CV. He wanted me to bring that experience and gravitas to the role to be able to do different. I wasn't by any means an expert on Indian cinema, but I knew enough to know that you hadn't really had a British actor play the different levels. One of the things that intrigued me is he said, you are not the baddy in this. In many respects, Thagalaan and Lord Clement are one and the same."

We also spoke about me playing a parallel lead to this big star called Vikram, whom I didn't know at the time. Now, I am proud to say that he is one of my closest friend. I knew all this was not normal. So yeah, that was why I agreed to do it without reading the script," he said.