“Working in the movie, especially with Hrithik and Farhan, was a great experience. For me, it’s a dream come true. We all watched the movie on the first day,” said Biju Nair, a clown with Rambo Circus.

The owner of Rambo Circus, Sujith Dileep, is quite happy with the outcome but is quick to point out that making a film with circus as the backdrop was much harder than holding the daily shows. “I feel filmmaking is much tougher than circus. I had seen Hrithik dancing on the sets for more than 10 hours at Goregaon studios in Mumbai. We had to shut down the circus for 30 days for the shoot, starting mid-June,” said Sujith, whose 350-strong unit moved to Mumbai and reconstructed the circus at Goregaon.

He remembers an incident when it was raining heavily and the film crew was shooting a song sequence. “Following the rain, the entire set was washed away and the tent was soaked in water. Within no time, our tent master had to put up another tent according to their requirement,” he said.

Baby Kesari, a senior player and gymnast in Rambo Circus, has the same opinion as her boss. “Circus is much easier than making movies. We have to perform only once in circus but in a movie, we have to perform a single stunt quite a number of times to make it perfect and appealing to the audience.”

Alexi Toporov, an Uzbek who performs ice-skating for Rambo Circus, with some Russian cinema experience already under his belt, had trouble adjusting with the timings of the shoot. “The shooting timings are very odd. We used to work on the movie sets from 2 pm to 8 am regularly. Once the shooting got over, it took a while for most of us to settle back in the normal schedule,” he said.