Bipasha Basu sacks international assignment

After sizzling on Bollywood screen for almost a decade, dusky beauty Bipasha Basu has signed her first international project -- English-French director Roland Joffe's Singularity. The 31-year-old is extremely excited and admits she does have butterflies in her stomach. "I am very excited...but have to admit that I am also a little nervous. Everything happened really fast," Bipasha told IANS over phone from Mumbai.

Bipasha met Joffe in a chance encounter at the Taj Land's End Hotel in Mumbai in September. The $33 million movie, written by Ajey Jhankar, is a riveting tale of an impossible love set across two time periods and continents.

It is set in the backdrop of the First Anglo-Maratha War of the 18th century and revolves around four characters - a British officer in colonial India and the Indian woman he falls in love with, an American marine biologist and his researcher lover -- who gets trapped in a wrecked British merchant ship. The film will be shot in Australia and India. Bipasha will be flying to Brisbane in the first week of November. Bipasha, who will be missing Diwali for the initial rehearsals for the film, says she would have loved to get some more time to prepare for her role.

"I am not getting much of preparation time right now. I have been given just eight days to prepare for underwater scenes and horse riding...I wish I had at least a month's time for preparation," she said. As much as she would have liked to, Bipasha is also not getting much time to brush up on her history. "There is just no time before I fly out! I have finished all my pending endorsement assignments and now I will try and grasp whatever I can there itself," she said.

Nevertheless, she is looking forward to working with Hollywood actors. "The script is fantastic. They have a lot of expertise in their field...it's going to be a whole lot of hard work, and it's going to be great fun to adapt to their system of working," she said. Singularity also stars Bollywood actor Abhay Deol besides Hollywood stars Chris Pine, Josh Hartnett, Olga Kurylenko, Christopher Egan and Shane Briant, among others.

Bipasha will shoot from the third week of November till the last week of December in Brisbane. Her upcoming Indian projects include Dum Maaro Dum and Abbas-Mustan's Players. Bipasha is glad that Abbas-Mustan, who gave her a launchpad with 2001 film Ajnabee, were accommodating enough to adjust their dates so that she could give her nod to Singularity.