JOIN USYou could easily mistake her for a silver-screen celebrity. Hip and haughty in skinny, ripped jeans, boots to match, and glares perched on her pert nose rather sassily. Ameira Punvani is no less than a winsome star, with blockbusters like Rustom, Benaras, Zinda, Guru...part of her successful trajectory as a costume designer in Bollywood.
“I love my work,” she exclaims, when we catch up for a quick chat in between her hectic shoot schedules. Born and brought up in Lucknow, the convent-educated, pint-sized dynamo is one of the leading costume designers in the film world today, thanks to her fierce fashion sense, in-depth understanding of character requirements and a natural grasp of situational inclusions while filming scripts.
Getting things right
Ameira is quite a perfectionist, absolutely possessed by her craft, and relishes every moment of it. “My life is all about my work. When I sign on a film, I am on call 24x7 and end up putting in 17-20 hours of work a day. There is hardly any time to sleep, forget about ‘me’ moments. I don’t know what it is like to ‘hang out’, as there is never any time for that. But my loved ones understand and respect my manic passion for my work.”
Of course, it is team work that takes her places. “I am lucky to have a fabulous team of tailors, dressmen and assistants. Taking on a movie is akin to an army getting ready for battle. Everything has to be planned meticulously and every crisis has to be dealt with adroitly on the spot. It is a heady rush,” she says, recalling an incident when the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was playing the Gujarati girl in filmmaker Mani Ratnam’s magnum opus Guru. “I scrunched up cheap cotton sarees, dipped into references through pictures of Gujarati families during those days.
Aishwarya is an absolute pleasure to work with, a thorough professional that she is. Humility personified, she even picked up the needle and thread and sewed on the errant fall of her saree on the sets of Guru. Abhishek never cribbed when we padded his stomach with a pillow filling and dhotis to create a paunch, in the sweltering Chennai heat, as his character demanded. Akshay Kumar is discipline and punctuality personified, absolutely...” she gushes. Guru was the first mega-commercial project that Ameira took on. She has also worked with Shaad Ali on his film Bunty Aur Babli, doing up the costumes of the secondary cast, before she plunged headlong into the crazy, glamorous biz of dressing up Bollywood stars. And yes, she launched her own fashion label Shunya before the film bug bit her.
Fortunes shine
“The job is anything but glamorous,” she laughs. “Still there is so much to learn everyday.” But being a single, beautiful, successful woman isn’t easy, in any line of work. “God has been kind. I am lucky to have had gotten the chance to work with fabulous filmmakers including Mani Ratnam, Shaad Ali, Neeraj Pandey...early on in my career. I didn’t have to struggle. I am professional in my attitude, and make space for absolutely no liberties. Work is sacred, and I take it seriously,” says Ameira.
Prod her a bit about the controversy surrounding the discrepancies in the naval uniform donned by Akshay in Rustom, and she retorts, “The medals, name tag, epaulette was a team decision. It was a collective call in decorating the main character in the movie, for the film was crafted as a medium of entertainment. We even had a former naval officer as an advisor to guide us along.” Well, it certainly did help in raking in the box-office success, and made AK look rather spiffy in the uniform.
At the moment, Ameira is working on a web series, Power Play, produced by Excel Entertainment. “I thought it would be slightly easy as opposed to shooting for a film,” she says with a smile. “There are 10 episodes of 45 minutes each, and around 171 members of the cast per episode whom I need to dress up. Crazy hours and detailing have been poured in. I am working with Richa Chadda and Vivek Oberoi for the first time and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience.
They are such superb actors, and know their craft inside out. It is wonderful to work with people who understand their characters so well, and come up with vital suggestions to add to the look of their characters. I believe that the simplicity of the costumes adds to the appeal. But at the same time, I deeply admire Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films where, each frame is a work of art. I hope to get a chance to work with him someday,” she says dreamily.