It's a point of honor that Shah Rukh Khan is being allowed to smoke in his hotel room. After all, it doesn't pay to be petty when the future of Berlin is at stake.
The Hotel Mandala on Potsdamer Platz normally forbids smoking throughout the premises, but the general manager has issued a special exception for one room, Suite 1107, until the end of November. He's even provided an ashtray.
The hotel wasn't about to tell the man who could be instrumental in improving Berlin's international standing that he couldn't smoke, even with his 30-cigarette-a-day habit. When Khan and his entourage check out again, the hotel will simply have to clean the carpets, sofa covers and mattresses, and repaint the walls, in Suite 1107.
Khan is India's most famous actor. He is as big a star there as Brad Pitt or George Clooney in the West. Some would even say that he's bigger than Pitt and Clooney combined. His fans have even erected a larger than life-sized statue of him in Calcutta -- which isn't much of an achievement, he jokes, because he isn't very tall.
Some call him King Khan. He is undoubtedly the king of Bollywood, the magical world of Mumbai's film industry, which specializes in gaudy films with the kitsch content of a snow globe, films that are now becoming increasingly popular in Germany. The decision by someone like Khan to use the German capital as the setting for one of his films could give tourism an enormous boost -- or at least that's what officials in Berlin hope.
It is Wednesday of last week, and the man on whom Berlin is pinning such massive hopes is sitting on a sand-colored couch, wearing jogging pants, lighting one cigarette after the next and holding his nose up in the air. He caught a cold on the previous day, because he didn't wear a jacket during an outside shoot. He isn't used to these kinds of temperatures, says Khan.
He has connected a Playstation to the television set. In the evenings, he and a few others, the producer, the director and some of the actors, play their own version of the football World Cup, while the female actresses play the role of cheerleaders. The strongest team of the week wins a cup. The world champion is selected after 50 days.
Khan is in Berlin to film the sequel to his action film "Don." At the end of the last film Don, the head of an international drug ring, managed to escape the police. "It isn't hard to catch Don," the most memorable sentence of the film went, "it's impossible!"
Now the villain has resurfaced, making an appearance at a gala event in the concert hall at Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt, where he is recognized despite the mask he is wearing. From there, police detectives chase him around the city until his car flies through the air over several other vehicles at the Brandenburg Gate. The gangsters have their conspiratorial rendezvous at the Berlin Cathedral and the Paul Löbe House, a German parliament office building. Other Berlin landmarks featured in the picture are the Olympic Stadium, the Chancellery and the remains of the Berlin Wall at the East Side Gallery.
Berlin figures prominently in "Don 2." The film's budget of €12 million ($16.2 million) includes €2 million in German funds. Most of that €2 million comes from the German Film Promotion Fund and the Berlin-Brandenburg Media Board, which has also contributed in the past to films like top Chinese actor Jackie Chan's "Around the World in 80 Days" and Quentin Tarantino's Nazi parody "Inglourious Basterds," portions of which were filmed at nearby Potsdam's Babelsberg Studio.
€7 Million in Revenue for German Economy
Kirsten Niehuus, the head of the Media Board, calls the outing by Bollywood star Khan to the German capital a "lighthouse project," and points out that other Indian producers have already expressed interest in working with her organization. Mathias Schwerbrock, the German co-producer, defends the country's financial injection by saying that the shoot will generate close to €7 million in revenue for the German economy. Most of the crew is German, as are some of the actors and almost all of the technology.
Contrary to what the name might suggest, the German Film Promotion Fund isn't focused solely on promoting German film. It also engages in site marketing. Those who contribute funding to a film have at least some say in determining where it will be shot. Farther to the south in Germany, in Heppenheim in the state of Hesse, this unwritten rule is still a source of resentment.
The small city of 25,000 people would also have liked to serve as a location for "Don 2". City officials felt that their chances were relatively good. Bollywood has already made four films in Heppenheim, which, with its half-timbered houses and surrounding vineyards, looks like the quintessential cliché of a German town. Last summer Farhan Akhtar, the director "Don 2," and Ritesh Sidhwani, the producer, were chauffeured around the Neckar River Valley north of Heidelberg, where the town is located. The waiters served up local specialties and locally produced wine at the Goldener Engel, a Heppenheim restaurant, and the two Indians were also taken to nearby Frankfurt to get a taste of the region's most cosmopolitan city -- a perfect setting for a film set in the banking industry.
The plan was, in fact, to shoot the film in Frankfurt and the surrounding area, but to the detriment of the region, Berlin's film and economic promoters also made it their mission to woo the producer and the director. They chauffeured the two men around the city, took them to dinner at the Käfer restaurant at the top of the parliament building, the Reichstag, directly next to the cupola. And because Switzerland happened to be celebrating its national holiday that week, the Swiss Embassy across the street put on a nightly fireworks display.
As soon as the filmmakers had decided on Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, the city's Social Democratic mayor, had his staff write a letter to city agencies and institutions, cordially asking them to do their best to support the filming.
Hardly anyone is as thrilled about all the excitement as Burkhard Kieker, whose office is less than a kilometer from Suite 1107. As the head of the Berlin tourism board, Kieker is paid to make over-the-top statements like this one: "Berlin was like Atlantis: a sunken city. It has just resurfaced, and it's still dripping wet, but now it is in the process of assuming its rightful place among Europe's superpowers of tourism".
Kieker, the CEO of Visit Berlin, talks about American tourists who trace the course of the Wall and figure out where Hitler's bunker once stood. He talks about vacationers from France and Italy, saying: "we're literally overrun with them." He also mentions the many Indians traveling to Berlin, although the latter group exists only in the realm of his wishes and dreams.
Probably no other economy but China's is doing quite as well as the Indian economy, which is predicted to grow by 9 percent this year. According to overly optimistic estimates, about a quarter of India's 1.2 billion people want to -- and can afford to -- travel abroad. Nevertheless, there is still a major obstacle to a boom in Berlin tourism among Indians: Hardly any Indians have ever taken notice of the city's existence before. The fact that India is home to one-sixth of the world's population makes this all the more tragic for Berlin.
Lessons from Switzerland
When Indians travel to Europe, they are usually drawn to Paris, London and Switzerland, places that are familiar to them through Bollywood films. Since the 1990s, Indian directors have had a penchant for shooting love stories against a backdrop of the snow-covered Alps. India has its own mountains in Kashmir, which are no less picturesque, but hardly anyone wants to shoot films in the unsafe border region.
About 100 Bollywood films have already been shot in the town of Interlaken, at the base of famous peaks like the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. The number of Indian tourists staying in Interlaken hotels has doubled in the last five years. There is even a restaurant called Bollywood, which seats 120 guests, in the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau. In the evening, there are "Indian Dinner Cruises" on Lake Brienz, featuring Indian music and Indian food served buffet-style. Is Berlin, of all places, destined to embark on a similar career as the object of South Asian dreams?
Indian travelers currently account for only 22,000 overnight stays in the city's hotels. Tourism director Kieker says that the number could grow tenfold in only two or three years -- as soon as th Indians have seen "Don 2," that is.
Shah Rukh Khan heartily agrees. "When we Indians like a film, we want to go to the place where it was filmed." This is his third time in the city. In February, his film "My Name is Khan" was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival. Already a devoted advocate of Berlin, he politely praises the city's beauty, saying: "you don't find the same blend of old buildings and modern architecture anyplace else." He praises a club where he celebrated his 45th birthday two weeks ago, and he raves about the mulled wine at the Christmas market behind his hotel and the Berlin branch of US toy retailer Toys 'R' Us, where he took his children. He also has good things to say about that famous gate, although the name escapes him at the moment.
Berlin Is Second Star in Khan Film
Gone are the days when Indian films were financed with the help of the Indian underworld. India is now the world's biggest film market, with more than 1,000 productions a year that are watched by 3 billion moviegoers. Bollywood is no longer derided. Warner Brothers, one of the biggest Hollywood studios, has co-produced Bollywood films. When the highly indebted MGM Studios, with its trademark roaring lion, was looking for a buyer, there was talk of the Indian media conglomerate Sahara India Pariwar acquiring a stake in the US company.
When "Don 2" premiers in 2,400 Indian theaters in December 2011, it will be preceded by a one-minute ad for Berlin as a vacation spot. According to the staff at Visit Berlin, palaces, parks and cafés appeal to the target group, Indians. The opening credits of the film will include the name of the nonsmoking hotel were Khan will have spent about 50 nights by the end of his mission. That was part of the deal when Visit Berlin was accepting proposals from five-star hotels to provide suitable and reasonably priced accommodations for the film crew.
Every day, there are a dozen women and girls waiting outside the hotel to get a glimpse of Shah Rukh Khan. There were close to 200 female fans on his birthday. The enthusiasm for Bollywood is still a niche phenomenon in Germany, where most people, when asked to name the biggest Indian-born star, would probably say: Mother Teresa. Or Ranga Yogeshwar.
That's why the nationwide launch of "Don 2" in Germany will be relatively modest. Perhaps it'll be 50 copies, says co-producer Mathias Schwerbrock. Or maybe only 30. That's the minimum number required to qualify for financial support from the German Film Promotion Fund.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Spiegel Internacional
