Khuda Haafiz came on Disney+Hotstar on August 14 last year when theatres were closed and no films were released. Now, when theatres, even in Maharashtra, are gearing up to start screening films again from October 22, Sanak was still unveiled on October 15 on the same OTT platform. You could have waited a week longer …
We were one of the first to release on OTT with a film of the scale of Khuda Haafiz. We got lucky. The film was a huge hit.
I myself grew up watching Jackie Chan’s films on VHS. I would pause the film and emulate him, attempting to do what he was doing on screen.
My next films will come to the theatres. So, Sanak is the last chance for young people to watch one of my films at home and do what I used to do when watching Jackie Chan. (Smiles) I learnt from his films, they can learn from this one too.
Was Sanak inspired in any way by the Denzil Washington thriller drama John Q?
No, Sanak is not at all like the film you mention. It is a hostage drama set in a hospital. That is the basic premise of the film. It’s not a copy of anything.
After the superhit Commando series, are you now planning to spin Khuda Haafiz into a franchise given that Part 2 is already on the floors?
We had no plans of making a sequel till one evening, after the film’s successful run, writer and director Faruk Kabir suddenly told me one evening, “You know Vidyut, every time a story ends with the man getting his wife back and the two of them living happily ever after. But in this case, since the film was inspired by a true story, I want to know what happened to the family after the couple returned home.”
Following this conversation, we decided to investigate and found out that the wife could not work anymore despite them having shifted to another city on their return because everyone now knew them and knew what had happened with them. So, though no one said anything to her directly, there were whispers and murmurs around her which made it difficult for her to go back to her job. It was no better for the husband. And that’s how Khuda Haafiz 2 came about.
It’s a phenomenal idea! We wanted to show what happened to this couple who had gone through so much turmoil together (after the wife was abducted in a foreign country) and had successfully returned home only for society to do this to them. As of now, I don’t know if there will be a Part 3.
Recently, we saw a beautiful picture of your fiancee Nandita Mahtani and you in front of the Taj Mahal after your September 1 engagement that warmed our hearts and made us believe in love again…
We went to the Taj Mahal together after I had proposed to her at an army camp while we were rappelling down a wall during a two-day break from shooting. (Smiles) I couldn’t just go down on one knee and propose, so many others had done it that way already. My proposal had to be different.
Also, I wanted the woman I love to know where I had been raised, where real men are nurtured. I had two days off from shoot and whisked her off to an army camp where I proposed to her in the company of 300 army officers. And after that we went to the Taj Mahal which I was seeing for the first and it was amazing. Absolutely wow!
