Hollywood director Willard Carroll loves mainstream Hindi cinema, and not just as an American tourist gazing down at exotica. So Carroll is in Rajasthan shooting a Bollywood film starring Salman Khan.

The film "Marigold", with a heavy dose of songs in Hindi and English and dances choreographed by Remo, began its first schedule March 27 at Khimsar Fort near Jodhpur.

The film's cast of Salman Khan, Ali Larter (who plays the title role) and Nandana Sen is currently having a ball on location.

Five years ago, Carroll made the wonderful romantic comedy "Playing By Heart", featuring Sean Connery.

His new film, a traditional love triangle, pays homage to the Great Bollywood Dream, particularly "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" and Sanjay Leela Bhansali - Carroll's favourite film and filmmaker from India.

The story about the relationship between an Indian choreographer Prem (Salman Khan, using his favourite name borrowed from Sooraj Barjatya's films), an American actress Marigold (Ali Larter) and Prem's Indian love-interest Jahnvi (Nandana Sen) will be stretched into a quadrangle when Jahnvi walks into the sunset with an American.

The film, therefore, has two sets of cross-cultural relationships intertwined into the Bollywood song and dance formula.

Unlike Gurinder Chadha's "Bride & Prejudice", which adapted a similar mood and format, though it kept itself ironically distanced from the notorious conventions and formulas of mainstream Hindi cinema, "Marigold" purports to go the whole hog.

There's no attempt by Carroll to distance himself from the Bollywood formula by irony or any other device.

According to Nandana Sen, "Willard Carroll seems to have studied the Bollywood conventions more closely and intimately than most of our directors. He seems to know our song and dance tradition better than us! I'm having a ball shooting with Salman and Ali."

"There's no undercurrent of rivalry. I guess that's something that happens when two Indian actresses work together. I've worked with international crews earlier, and this one is as professional as it gets. They've got everything so much in place that I can't dream of taking a day off to visit my ailing grandmother in Shantiniketan," she said.

After the Rajasthan schedule, the "Marigold" unit moves to Mumbai May 12. The shooting will be over mid-May after one song filmed on Salman and Ali.

So is Salman ready for an international career?

Unlike Aamir Khan who had employed an agent in Los Angeles to get him work after "Lagaan", Salman appears to have no plans - immediate or otherwise - of using "Marigold" as a stepping stone into Hollywood.

It remains to be seen whether Salman's pairing with his sexy American co-star Ali Larter (she played the clairvoyant teenager in the plane-crash horror flick "Final Destination" and its sequel) turns out to be more successful than Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson in "Bride & Prejudice".