Some Bollywood movie facts that will make every 2000s kid will say ‘Hey I never knew about it’.
1 Shah Rukh Khan’s kids have apparently never seen the actual ending of the film ‘Kal Ho Na Ho’. Karan Johar, the director, was kind enough to make special edit of the film for them where the story ends before Aman (played by Shah Rukh Khan ) dies.
2 Farah Khan, director of ‘Om Shanti OM’ thought that Deepika Padukone gave a terrible screen test for the film. In fact, the production team thought her diction was so bad they had to turn the sound off. But Farah was so taken by Deepika’s beauty, that she decided to cast her anyway and dub her voice in selected scenes.
3 Karan Johar was so stressed during the shooting of the song “ Bole Chudiyan” (Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham) that he fainted due to dehydration. He eventually ended up giving instructions on his walkie-talkie from bed for the day.
4 The first ever cut of ‘Lagaan’ was seven and a half hours long.
5 The film ‘Jab We Met’ was written as a result of a writing exercise with a friend of Imtiaz Ali, the film’s director. The exercise was to combine two elements and make a story out of it. The friend suggested ‘a man who wants to commit suicide while Imtiaz suggested ‘ a girl on a train’.
6 Raj Kumar Hirani wanted everything for ‘Munnabhai MBBS’ to be authentic because it was his directorial debut. For the dissection scenes, he considered shooting in a real dissection room with real dead bodies. But eventually, he changed his mind and used actors to play dead bodies.
7 Farah Khan, pregnant at the time that “ Dard E Disco” of ‘Om Shanti Om’ was being shot, would throw up every time Shah Rukh Khan took his shirt off for the song.
8 Both Salman Khan and John Abraham rejected the role of Kabir Khan in ‘Chak De India’ before Shah Rukh Khan took it up.
9 The mud fight from ‘Nayak’ was supposed to be shot in water. At the time of the shoot, Anil Kapoor refused to shave his body hair, and finally, it was planned to smear him in mud.
10 During the first reading for ‘Chak De India’, Shah Rukh Khan admitted to fumbling with his dialogues on purpose for the team of girls to be able to feel more confident about themselves and make himself approachable to them.
11 Initially, only the opening bass line was composed for “ Dil Chahta Hai”. One morning, while brushing his teeth, Shankar Mahadevan realized that the words “ Dil Chahta Hai” fit in the same tune and he rushed to Farhan Akhtar, the director of the film, to explain the tune to him.
12 Karan Johar thought “ Dil Chahta Hai” would not do well and that Aamir Khan had lost the plot by choosing to act in it.
13 The script and dialogues for “ Dil Chahta Hai” were first written entirely in English.
14 John Abraham, who plays Kabir in ‘Dhoom’, executed the scene where his bike rides into a moving trailer. His only instruction to the others around him was to swerve in case he fell, if they did not, he would certainly be ridden over them.
15 The draft for ‘3 Idiots’ was written before Munnabhai MBBS. It was supposed to star Hrithik Roshan, Saif Ali Khan, and Abhishek Bachchan.
16 Uday Chopra borrowed the mannerism for his character of Ali in Dhoom from a guy he frequently saw hanging around in a cinema hall in Mumbai.
17 Upon filming the first take for ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’, Arshad Warsi could not recapture the mannerisms he had in the original ‘Munnabhai MBBS’, and sounded like himself with an accent. Raj Kumar Hirani gave him the DVD of the original to study the character again.
18 The food shown in the film ‘Jodhaa Akbar’ was made of pure ghee. The actors were horrified by retakes and refused to eat more than once in the scenes.
19 The salt used for the fake snow in ‘Black’ looked convincing enough to even fool residents of Shimla city, who wondered if it actually snowed in their town overnight.
20 While shooting for the drunk scene in ‘3 Idiots, Aamir Khan, the perfectionist, suggested that they get drunk for real, which resulted in so many retakes that the film roll got over.
21 Siddharth admitted that he did not enjoy being a ‘bad influence’ on kids by smoking a lot in ‘Rang De Basanti’.
22 Hrithik Roshan’s horse in ‘Jodhaa Akbar’ would get triggered by the word “action” and start galloping. So, the cast and crew would avoid using the word around it.
23 the glasses that Hrithik wore in ‘Koi.. Mil Gaya’ were the same pair he wore as Raj in the second half of ‘Kaho Na Pyar Hai’.
24 Aamir Khan never stands still in ‘3 Idiots’. He is always swaying in some direction. Apparently, he concluded that the new generation of kids never stand still after observing his nephew.
25 Sanjay Dutt was the first choice to play Suniel Shetty’s role in ‘Hera Pheri”.
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Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
12th May 2023