Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt is always full of stories. One such is about the phase in his career where he felt he was done with directing and was convinced movies were not that big for him to dedicate his entire life to it. This was the time he chose to walk out of Ghulam, headlined by superstar Aamir Khan.
The Vikram Bhatt-helmed blockbuster was initially supposed to be directed by Mahesh Bhatt. In a conversation with indianexpress.com, Bhatt recalls Aamir asking him if he could channel all his passion and dedicate his life to the making of Ghulam. Bhatt turned this down.
“I choose to walk away from it. I told Aamir, I didn’t think movies meant so much to me that I would dedicate my entire life to it. It doesn’t mean so much to me and I’d be lying if I say otherwise,” Bhatt says, adding that Aamir was “quite stunned” by his integrity.
“I told him if there is one person who can give his life to it, it is Vikram Bhatt. When I saw Ghulam, I announced on stage that he made a better film than I could!” He adds: “That is the victory of a master… That he may give an unlit candle his flame, but when the flame becomes a radiant sun, you bask in that, it is wonderful.”
Mahesh Bhatt (Photo: Express Archives)
How Vikram Bhatt became a trusted aide
When Indianexpress.com met the ace filmmaker, he was taking a quick break between camera setups. Alone in the room, Bhatt was keeping himself busy on the phone, a device that has an amusing connection with his career, at least some part of it.
“In the mid-90s, the desire to make movies started withering in me,” Bhatt remembers. The veteran filmmaker, who dabbled in every genre throughout the late 80s and 90s, excelling at the box office and raking in critical acclaim, says he reached a stage in his career where he started to feel he was done with filmmaking. Bhatt had by then directed some landmark films of the era, including Arth, Saaransh, Daddy, Aashiqui, Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin, Zakhm, and Sadak.
“I thought this is the same… is this what I want? I had seen back-to-back hits, received critical acclaim, had box office acclaim, and then it was the same nonsense of, ‘First half is good, the second half is slow’. You listen to mediocre people sitting down and passing judgment. Then you think, how much more do you want it and why? So the desire started withering in me… that was the wasteland phase of my life,” he tells indianexpress.com.
Watch Mahesh Bhatt talk about walking away from Aamir Khan’s Ghulam:
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This was when Bhatt started trusting his aides, especially filmmaker Vikram Bhatt, to execute his “phone direction”. Vikram’s father Pravin Bhatt was the DOP on almost all of Bhatt’s films since his 1974 debut Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain. Others have revealed how durng this phase, Bhatt would call in with instructions on how to frame shots and get the job done.
“Now, when I look back and wonder why I would leave everything and go, I think it is because I didn’t feel the need to perform as a director. There was a younger, sharper mind, who could do far better and do justice to it. I trusted him (Vikram Bhatt) more with it. That’s how he became a director when I started playing hooky and giving ‘phone direction’,” Bhatt reminisces about the phase where we almost went into auto-pilot mode.
Mahesh Bhatt and Vikram Bhatt have reunited for the new Disney Plus Hotstar film Bloody Ishq. Starring Avika Gor and Vardhan Puri, the film is written by Mahesh Bhatt and directed by Vikram Bhatt.
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