Actress Bhumi Pednekar embodies the fact that talent and hard work can make one a success story. She reveals some of her hectic preparations for her forthcoming film, Sonchiriya.
“I have been called a perfectionist but I think everyone worked equally hard. Starting with director Abhishek Chaubey, who in our very first meeting told me that the only way to survive the terrain and everything that is happening in the film is to become mentally and physically strong. And he just didn’t mean emotionally but also physically because there is a lot of action, including running around. He trained us really well, starting from Bundelkhandi, the language that we are speaking,” Bhumi reveals.
“The physicality of my character concerned Chaubey the most. He really went into the details of it and he literally told me that the women of Chambal are carb-eating women. They are muscular but they are lean and they are fit because of the amount of work they do throughout the day. They walk kilometers, fetch eight-10 litres of water, on their head, sometimes, while carrying a child in their arm. Every time they want to go to the washroom, they have to walk miles. Throughout the day they work at home or in the fields. They don’t really rest and I planned my workout around what he told me,” she adds.
Bhumi’s work out regime is the highlight of her prep for Sonchiriya. “So, my trainer Neelam (pilates instructor) came up with a regime where everything was around the kind of activities my character would do throughout the day. It was like a month and a half before we started shooting. So, I would walk around with five-six litres of water on my head in Aaram Nagar for kilometers without any shoes because we were trying to also get rough and tough. But then your body gets used to it. I remember I would carry 10-15 kgs of wheat sack on my back and again walk and run through the area because there is a lot of running in the film. I would grind a kg of wheat flour every day. It looks very easy but it is tough. We included a few things that helped me get the physique of a person who is native to the area,” she says.