Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali recently shared an interesting anecdote from the making of his landmark film Rockstar with Ranbir Kapoor and Nargis Fakhri in 2011. He said that he and Ranbir knew each other because he had made Love Aaj Kal that starred the actor’s late father Rishi Kapoor and Deepika Padukone, who was his then-girlfriend, but the two had never really met each other before Rockstar.
In a conversation on Mid Day’s Sit With Hitlist, Imtiaz recollected his first meeting with Ranbir. He said, “Love Aaj Kal was being made so his dad must have told him about me, oh, hang on, Deepika had told him everything about me. She was in the movie… so ya, we knew each other but we never met, we met at a screening and then we decided to meet. So I met him and was telling him about a script that I wanted to make a film on with him. It was some other script, (not Rockstar). Before I got on to it I asked him if he’d read it, he said ‘ya’, we didn’t really get around talking about it much and then he said, ‘sir, you have this other film (mentioning Rockstar)’, so I asked him how he knew about it and he said a friend of his told him. He then narrated the story how there is this guy who wants to become a musician, but he didn’t have any tragedy in his life,” and he asked, ‘that’s your film right?'”
Imtiaz then shared how he had lost the script of Rockstar and had to rewrite it for Ranbir. He said that he kept looking at Ranbir while he was narrating Rockstar’s story to him and thought, “This is the guy for this film! He was narrating the story to me and that became such a good thing. So I asked him if he wanted to do the film and he said, ‘Yes sir, let’s make this’, so I said give me some time, I’ll see where the script is, I’ll write it and give it to you. I had lost the script. So I had to write it again.”
While Rockstar is one of the most popular films made by the actor-director duo — Ranbir and Imtiaz, it was not a success when it was first released in cinemas. A certain section of the audience didn’t like Nargis’s portrayal of Heer in the film because she was too westernised. Imtiaz says, now people don’t have an issue with her.
The film received a lot of love when it was recently re-released in theatres. Imtiaz said, “Rockstar was re-released in theatres now and it had a tremendous run. When you watch it now, nobody complains about Nargis (Fakhri). This generation has accepted her because they are also aware of people like Nargis, (who are) more westernised, more American.”
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