For sheer pizzazz—and number of pictures produced—India's over-the-top film industry, known as Bollywood, easily out-hollywoods Hollywood.

Yash has just come back from a scouting trip in Switzerland, where, he boasts, he didn't spend a single franc because the Swiss government hosted him. "Everything on the house," he says with the glee of a producer who's spent his life making budgets stretch. The Swiss have given him an award for the contribution his films have made to tourism, and a lake where he often shoots is known as Chopra Lake. Now in Mumbai a crew of hundreds is working through the night to complete the scene in which Veer brings his sweetheart home. Next to Yash on the set is Amitabh Bachchan, the actor who is playing Veer's uncle. A larger-than-life figure in Bollywood for decades, Amitabh was ranked the "greatest star of stage or screen" in a BBC online vote in 1999, winning out over Chaplin, Olivier, and Brando. He is sitting on four plastic chairs stacked on top of each other, their arms bound by packing tape, because he needs a high chair to keep his long legs comfortable. When Amitabh gets up to dance with the others, it seems slightly undignified, this icon of the cinema—and hero of my childhood—having to perform MTV-inspired dances at the age of 63. The moves seem slightly stale to me: The dancers throw their arms about, twirl, throw out their arms again. But when Amitabh comes back to his improvised throne and watches the replay of the song on a monitor, he's clearly pleased. "We are too much," he says, laughing. "We are unbelievable!" Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.