Hollywood stars stunt trainer for Irrfan, Arjun

One of the top-most American action directors Tom Struthers who co-ordinated the action scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond and Inception, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Raises and Nicolas Cage in The Season Of The Witch is currently in Mumbai training Arjun Rampal and Irrfan for never-before action scenes in Nikhil Advani’s D Day.
The film is about a ragged bunch of RAW agents who are sent by the Indian government to bring Dawood Ibrahim from Pakistan by road.The action scenes to be shot in Kutch, right next to where Sanjay Leela Bhansali would be shooting his spicy love story Ram Leela, are meant to be raw, edgy, intimately combative and yet sophisticated in the way trained agents fight when they encounter adversaries in unexpected locations.
Says a source close to the project, “Nikhil Advani doesn’t want the action scenes to look like replicas of what we’ve lately seen onscreen RAW agents Saif Ali Khan and Salman Khan do in Agent Vinod and Ek Tha Tiger. Advani wants his heroes Irrfan and Arjun Rampal to fight like combat soldiers using their minds as weapons. For this he invited Tom Struthers who is known the world over for his unabashedly macho but documentary-authentic stunts.”
According to a source close to the project, “Arjun’s and Irrfan’s fight scenes in D Day would resemble footage out of CNN or BBC documentaries showing soldiers fighting in war-torn areas.
Arjun who is training rigorously with Struthers says, “I did one kind of action recently Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh which was very different from the action we see in Hindi films. Now I am training for Nikhil’s film with Tom Struthers who is like a phenomenon in the area of movie stunts.”
Apparently Irrfan and Arjun’s body types have been put through a metabolic change to accommodate the kind of stunts Struthers would have them do in D Day. Interestingly Rishi Kapoor who has never done serious action in any of his films is also training under Struthers for D Day. According to sources, Rishi too would be required to “kick some serious ass” in D Day, a film where RAW agents would be shown as heroic yet real.
Meanwhile producer Sunil Bohra is planning a film called RAW about a RAW agent who is sent on a dangerous mission across the border. Bohra plans to turn director with this project.