He’s a master illusionist. For Vishal Bharadwaj’s film Kaminey, he has recreated everything from a South African village to Mumbai’s red light district Kamathipura — all at the Ramoji Film Studios on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

Cut to Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 in which art director Samir Chanda has waved his magic wand once again. Famously, for this movie he hunted out a side street in Sambar, 65km from Jaipur and turned it into a bustling imitation of Chandni Chowk complete with hanging wires, ageing yellowed buildings and autorickshaws emitting noxious fumes.

“It was too crowded to shoot in Chandni Chowk. We needed rickshaws, a banyan tree, a mosque and a temple and finally it was all recreated in Sambar,” says Chanda.

Chanda has been spending time in Calcutta for director Mani Ratnam’s latest venture Ravaana. Shooting has been taking place in a house by the Hooghly. “All I wanted in Calcutta is the river and a house by the river. The house is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s home in the film,” says Chanda.

Every film presents its own challenges for Chandra. Ravaana is tough because it’s a modern day interpretation of an age-old epic. Says Chanda: “The minute you think about Ravana, you think about those 10 heads and the ethnic backdrop. But Ratnam’s film has a good versus evil theme set in today’s India. So I had to be careful about the sets and location.”

Chanda, 51, is a Bollywood veteran and it’s all in a day’s work for him to turn a studio into a 1930’s courtroom where Bhagat Singh is being sentenced to death (in Rang De Basanti). The movie, directed by Mehra, was difficult because he had to move back and forth between Bhagat’s freedom struggle days and modern-day India.

In Bollywood there are villains, comedians and real, unalloyed heroes. But Chanda jumps between roles. He helped bring to life the badlands of north India in Omkara. For this, he first had to study a real north Indian village. “It involved lots of details,” he says.

Then, he has worked in period films like Sardari Begum, Zubeida and Sardar Patel. And he aided the complex task of bringing a legend to life in Shyam Benegal’s Bose: The Forgotten Hero which won him a National Award in 2005.

Chanda says that Benegal has been a father figure all through his movie career. They’ll be working together once again in an untitled movie, a modern-day satire set in Telangana. Says Benegal: “I first saw Samir’s work in 1981 when he and Nitish Roy (art director) created the set for Mrinal Sen’s film Kharij in a large warehouse in Calcutta.”

Chanda recreated an entire village for Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara

Mani Ratnam is another director who almost always calls on Chanda’s services — they’ve worked together on a string of movies from Dil Se to Guru. And Chanda admits that Ratnam is a demanding boss who insists on getting everything just right.

“His quest for perfection sometimes makes him change the sets even just before a shot. We call him ‘Tiger’. He can actually take you to the mountain top and ask you to jump,” says Chanda. Ratnam says: “He (Chanda) will head a lot of things and teach you how it is done. And sometimes he’s like a student willing to trust you and blindly follow unorthodox and wild ideas.”

Chanda is equally at home shooting in a studio or on location. But location shooting can present its own problems. He usually looks for reasonably quiet streets or areas. In crowded places, he has to work odd hours in order to avoid the crowds and traffic. Says Chanda: “The challenge is to create a confusion between the real and what has been created to look like real.”

At times, of course, huge amounts are spent on the sets. The veteran art director says that Aks (2001) directed by Mehra was the most expensive set he ever created. Says Chanda: “The main characters in the film — a psychotic terrorist and a cop — had a lot of madness in them and so it was fun creating a suitable backdrop.”

The set the art director created for Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6

Chanda still likes to roam the streets of Calcutta like he used to as a student of Art College in the ’70s. He moved to Mumbai in search of a job after graduation. “I lost my father at the age of seven. I needed to make money. The moment I reached Mumbai, I realised it would be a tough fight to succeed,” he says. He struck lucky when legendary art director Nitish Roy took him under his wing.

Interestingly, Chanda’s also trying his hand at directing films. He has finished making a Bengali film, Ek Nodir Golpo, starring Mithun Chakraborty and Shweta Prasad (of Makdee fame). Then, he’s planning a movie based on a real life story about an AIDS patient.

Nevertheless, he knows that he isn’t about to give up his current role as Bollywood’s master magician. “I will continue to be an art director,” he says, putting his arm around some huge puppets that have arrived from Jhargram for a show. There are many more illusions and make-believe worlds to recreate.