Amitabh Bachchan And Dharmendra Left Sholay Sets To Have Drinks, Director Feared They Were Lost In Jungle

Long before film sets became tightly regulated and safety briefings turned routine, Bollywood ran on instinct, risk and bravado. Few films capture that era better than Sholay. Behind its legendary dialogues and iconic scenes lies a moment that could have changed Hindi cinema forever. During filming, a single gunshot went wrong. Amitabh Bachchan missed death by half a centimetre. Decades later, director Ramesh Sippy has laid bare how close the industry came to an unthinkable tragedy. When a cult classic nearly turned fatal The Sholay gun incident happened during the filming of the climax, a sequence now etched into pop culture. In an earlier exclusive interview with us, Ramesh Sippy revisited the moment that stunned the entire unit. “It happened while

filming the climax.” What was meant to be a simple loading action suddenly turned dangerous. Sippy explained how events spiralled in seconds. “That was the one in which he picked up the bullets, stuffed them in… and in this shot, he was not supposed to fire… He was just expected to load the gun. But what he did was put the gun up and fired, Amitabh Bachchan was standing up there as it was his position–at the edge of the cliff and the bullet wizzed passed him.” The margin between cinema and catastrophe was terrifyingly thin. Why the shoot was abruptly called off The aftermath was immediate and tense. The action cameraman refused to continue, shaken by how close the incident came to disaster. “Jim Allen–the action cameraman said I will not shoot. He said if actors behave like this… it can’t happen on my set. I don’t want any accident to take place. That day, the shooting was cancelled and we obviously looked after him–cooled him off. We made Dharmendra also understand that its okay to get into the mood, but you cannot shoot when there’s possibility of accidents. He understood. He apologised to Jim and Amit Ji. They worked it out. Obviously, it was not intentional, it just happened.” The set only resumed after emotions cooled and safety concerns were addressed. The day both stars vanished Sippy also recalled another unsettling episode that left the crew anxious. Both lead actors disappeared without warning during the shoot. “We got worried. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t understand if they were on a mischievous trip or if they were lost in the jungle. We didn’t know if we should start looking for them. We set out to try and look for them and finally, a couple of hours later they turned up. I think they had a good time with a couple of drinks. But they were back and intact and everything was fine.”