The hills are alive - with the sound of Hindi

Bollywood discovers the latest exotic location in Scotland

Tony Hussain serves food in his Indian restaurant in Dundee every evening. In the mornings he runs a company making Nan breads for supermarkets. And in the afternoons he is making multi-million pound movies.

The 30-year-old restaurateur is spearheading an extraordinary invasion from Bollywood - the Bombay-based Indian movie industry - eager to make films against the background of lochs and hills.

It started last year when a famous Indian director, Dev Annand, was on holiday and came into Mr Hussain's restaurant. Annand,72, had been making films for 50 years, and Mr Hussain who was born in Scotland and adores the country, offered to give him a tour of the Highlands to persuade him to make film there.

After the tour, Mr Annand made a Hindi film last year in Scotland called My Sweet 16, and even cast Hussain, who had never acted, in a small part as a villainous night club owner. Within weeks, other Bombay directors were ringing him up, asking him to arrange locations for them.

Hussain set up his own production company, and working with Scottish Screen and the British Film Commission, has arranged locations in Inverness, Dundee and all over the Highlands. Shooting starts this weekend on a new pounds 5m Hindi film, Desire, in which Hussain will again have a part as a villain, and which will star top Bollywood performers Madhuri Dixit (said by Mr Hussain to be the Demi Moore of India) and Ashi Komar (the Tom Cruise). The film also stars Amaresh Puri who played the villain in an Indiana Jones film. Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, even raised the film in the Commons this weeks to help get some of the 80-strong crew and cast work permits.

Mr Hussain said yesterday: "This film will be subtitled in 27 different languages, and could make up to pounds 100m. I've arranged the speedboats for stunts on Loch Lomond and helicopters for other scenes. If you can market a movie in India as made in Scotland, it's an automatic blockbuster. So many people have relations in Britain and it is escapism for them to see the locations. But until I started speaking to them, the film directors in Bombay didn't really seem to know that Scotland existed. Now they do, and you do get the occasional elderly couple visiting Blair Castle in Perthshire rather taken aback to see 50 Asians in costume running about."

Mr Hussain says he will not be giving up his restaurant or nan bread- making business: "The acting is a hobby. I don't get paid for it. In our culture you don't take money off your friends, though, yes, I will be taking a share from the profits of the film we are working on now. But I am still running my other businesses. I do the movie making in my spare time because I want to promote Scotland."

The current film concerns two men, one born in Britain, one in India, who love the same girl. The crew and cast have been booked into a hotel in Angus by Mr Hussain. Their food will be prepared in a mobile kitchen by a chef who happens to be Mr Hussain's brother. Meanwhile the man, who is rapidly turning into Scotland's biggest movie impresario, while professing to do it only in his spare time, is negotiating to make three other movies in the Highlands.

It is a development being warmly welcomed by the British Film Commission, though privately they voice the occasional problem with a culture clash.

"There has been a little awkwardness," said one official. "When the crews come in to a hotel they tend to bring their own cooks to make Indian food and expect to take over the kitchens. This has not gone down well with one or two Scottish hotels, where the chefs have been rather affronted."