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Rajiv Rai on 31 years of Mohra, "I never expected it to be a blockbuster or a superhit or even a hit" 31 : Bollywood News - Bollywood Hungama

Published 7 hours ago10 minute read

Filmmaker Rajiv Rai’s Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Raveena Tanson and Naseeruddin Shah starrer Mohra completed 31 years today. He looked back at the making of the film in an interview with us.

Rajiv Rai on 31 years of Mohra, "I never expected it to be a blockbuster or a superhit or even a hit"

Rajiv Rai on 31 years of Mohra, “I never expected it to be a blockbuster or a superhit or even a hit”


I never expected Mohra to be a blockbuster or a superhit or even a hit. I was very worried and scared and didn't know how people would accept the film and the cast. And I didn't actually know, I didn't figure out if the music would also hit the bullseye. So it is with every film, Subhash. It's very difficult to gauge a film because you watch it a hundred times during editing and you lose track and you lose judgment of your own film. If somebody says I can judge my own film, well, I don't know, good luck to him. But I can never ever judge any of my films. I am always worried and scared about how a film would turn out.


Viju Shah's music obviously played one of the biggest roles, but it also had good performances, good storyline, good action. It was a gripping thriller, and music those days mattered in every film. We had six songs in nearly every film we produced and directed at Trimurti Films, with the background. So Viju Shah has always been a backbone to all my films and we had great hit songs. I think every track actually at that time had done very well. Of course, ‘Tu cheez badi hai mat mas’t and ‘Tip tip barsa paani’ were on top. But the other tracks also huge hits.

So of course I was very lucky to get that kind of music . And I think Viju and me somewhere down the line make a great team also. And that also makes a lot of difference that we synchronize and he understands what I want and I know what he's going to deliver. And also he gets the story, gets the subject, he gets the situation in the film. And one of the things we have to always remember that to make good music, we need good lyrics and Anand Bakshi played a very major role. So it wasn't only Viju, it was the combination of Viju and Anand Bakshi Saab. And of course, me as a director, it was like a teamwork there.


I don't think that thing existed at that time. When I mean is, you can say that in ‘Tip Tip’, you can say that to ‘Cheez’. But I don't think that thought crossed our minds or even Bakshi Saab thought of it that way. We didn’t have that kind of mindset to make a song vulgar or to misuse women. I think people have become very conservative today, and maybe rightly so, because women are being mistreated and you hear of so many incidents about women in the world and in India that you really feel bad and you have to be careful that you don't abuse a woman in any way or you don't misinterpret your language in any way towards a woman.

But at that time, these thoughts weren't in our head. We did not do anything that we thought was going to be under the moral radar, that we were doing something that women wouldn't like or that society wouldn't like. It’s different now. Every step you take, every breath you take, you have to be careful that you don't make a mistake, whether it's a woman or it's religion or it's a society or it's a state or it's some sentiment that you're hurting. So as a filmmaker, you're really there with a magnifying glass looking at every angle hoping not to make any mistake, or hurt people’s sentiments.


Divya Bharti was my first choice. There was nobody else in my mind. You know, it's not like I have a list of people in my head or a director has a list of people. No director has a list of people because you hardly have a choice of three, four people, whether it's a male actor or a female actor. There's never a choice in Bollywood. So there's always a scarcity and the demand and supply. There's no supply. There's a big demand. So to say, oh, would I have taken that girl or this girl? Where is the choice today? I mean, whom do you cast? So there are some talented people today who are popular with the audiences.

So I was looking for a person I could sign up and would give me like one month or two months and not do another film. So that was my casting dilemma with women. It was not so with the men. So you have to make up your mind. Okay, you got Sunny Deol, Chunky Pandey, Naseeruddin Shah. You got their dates there. Now, if I'm going to get female actresses, I'm not going to be able to make a combination. So you have to compromise or call it sacrifice.


Yeah, that was the first choice. And she passed away, died very suddenly, unfortunately. It was an unfortunate accident and a big loss to Bollywood. And we all miss her. And she was a fantastic actress, person as a personality, very good to work with. And well, what can I say? We all, that's the past. We all know. Everybody knows what happened and everybody is sad about it.


I have five films that I'm really fond of, which I've directed. I'm not talking about my father (Gulshan Rai)'s Deewaar or Vidhata or Trishul or even Johnny Mera Naam. Those are films my dad produced, but they are also very important to me. But the ones that I directed, I would think Yudh. I consider that very high in my order. Then there was Tridev, of course, that's in the top. Vishwatma was in the top. Mohra is in the top, Gupt is in the top. So I have five films that I adore and I am very proud of that I feel are my commercially good work. I never ran after awards, doing an art film thinking I would get a National award.


It was always survival. Everything was survival. You're putting in a lot of money and it was a nightmare and you would think, oh my God, will I get through this with this film? Will it do well? It was all about praying to God every day. Please save me. Get me out of this. Help me make this film work. I don't want my father to have a loss. I would nag my mother every day, are you praying or not? So who knew whether the audience would accept the film? Who knew? I didn't know. And so if you say now looking back that which is my best film, that'd be very unfair because all these films are films that I worked very hard on and I wrote stories or screenplays that I penned were very original in my opinion.

I would spend a lot of time doing the writing. And I obviously had to get the dialogue done. I was never tops in Hindi. So I always wanted, I needed help in the dialogue. So I always had a dialogue writer. The screenplay, it pretty much came to me naturally, but it took me a lot of time. And so the way I look at it is that by the time I finished writing a film and I was getting on to directing it, it was already close to my heart. I was already excited about it. Can I change anything in it? Have I gone somewhere wrong? Is it going to be too lengthy? Am I going to have an editing problem? Will I have to edit it down? Am I overshooting it? Can I cut something on the screenplay or the story? Things like that. So a director is always toying with the ideas. He's always changing things last minute. He is always rewriting a dialogue at the last minute. He is sometimes changing the screenplay here or there.

You know, you don't get the right location or you don't get the right shot. And then you're improvising. Every day you're improvising. And I'm sure Hollywood does that too. That's how films are made. You improvise as you go along. And that's why a director is very important. And I place four or five cameras in all my films. It's like one shot has four angles or five angles. So it was a lot of work for me. And I had to capture the story. I had to tell my story.

So it's for any director, I would think it's a very tough and a very invigorating job where he has a lot to do. He has to think when he finishes his work that night or that when the shift gets over, he goes on thinking, gets up thinking. When he's driving to the shoot, he's thinking. So he's always creatively all there. How can I improve this? Am I doing something wrong? So for me now to say this was the best film I made would be a lie. I do feel the last hit was Gupt. And the last film that you do is very close to your heart, because that was your last success. And so you remember it also vividly.


Every film, I tried to do it differently. In Gupt, I didn't want a typical one-song film. I wanted all the songs to work. And I was making a murder mystery, which I hadn't done earlier. So it was different for me. But as a screenplay, I think, honestly speaking, my best was Mohra. It had a very interesting screenplay. And it had everything in there. And Tridev, of course, was where I had to break free. So that was very important.

And Vishwatma went abroad. So that was another challenge altogether, to go and shoot in a foreign country like Nairobi. It was not easy. You know, it was not a free democratic country at that time, that you couldn’t just place a camera anywhere and take your shots. There were a lot of permissions involved. I had to get partners in there. The country wouldn't allow me to go there. So that was another challenge. I've been very lucky. I'll tell you, having the father I had, Gulshan Rai, the home banner Trimurti films, so I've been very fortunate. And then another thing, I would like to say about Mohra.


In Mohra, I was very fortunate with all my actors. Nobody ever gave me any trouble. I mean, if you ask me, who's your favourite actor? And who do you want to work again with? Or who do you like the most? Or who's your best friend or whatever? I mean, I will never be able to answer that, you know, because everybody was extra-kind to me. They understood I knew my work. They respected me, I respected them in return. And they were all, you know, either saleable. And we worked as friends. So, I am very indebted to not only stars, but the entire starcast, even the villains, even the actors who do one-one scenes, they're very important to a director. So I'm very indebted to anybody who shares the camera with me. And I will always thank them because they've all contributed.

More Pages: Mohra Box Office Collection


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