A filmmaker admitting the flaws and political incorrectness inside a film he made long ago — that too, a long-running blockbuster — is a rare sight. But Karan Johar is the kind of filmmaker who has always been candid about his work and has never felt reluctant to reflect on his shortcomings or talk about some of the occasional shortcuts he took in business.
Karan was talking about his debut film Kuch Kuch Hota Hain (KKHH) — starring Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, and Kajol — in a podcast hosted by Lilly Singh, wherein he expressed his changed perspectives on the storytelling approach that he once followed. Karan admitted to not giving any thought to social responsibilities while making the film.
KKHH, he says, was born out of a strong urge to produce a hit for his father and their home banner when the latter was experiencing the distressing after-effects of consecutive flops — five back-to-back failures. It was a matter of prestige and the film was Karan's way of restoring that for his father. The gender politics was not his concern at that point.
“I was 24 years old at the time of writing Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. I grew up as a producer’s son. I grew up understanding what box office business is and how our country basically has a varied audience — from theatres in cities to small towns, the thinking is different in both. The divide came much later with multiplexes and single screens, but at the time I was writing it, there was just the single screen," he said.
Karan's only goal, then, was to "make a big, monstrous hit" for his dad. "I wasn’t thinking about contributing to society or making a film that would make a difference or saying the politically correct thing that would be impressionable to a large audience. And I wanted to do this not for material reasons but for prestige and my father to win back his morale."
He recalls a moment when Shabana Azmi called him and congratulated him on his success but also reprimanded him with regard to the film's politics.
Azmi's question had to do with the Anjali character, played by Kajol — how Shah Rukh Khan's character Rahul didn't find her appealing when "she had short hair" but fell in love with her later when "she became hot and sexy," and the veteran actress wondered what kind of politics Karan was talking about.
"I said sorry and told her I wasn't thinking about all this. I just grew up on a certain fodder of Hindi cinema, and I just wanted to platform that. I wasn't thinking that Rahul isn't a complete green flag," he adds.
Karan points to Rahul's "latent hypocrisy", which, he says, came from him, not SRK. The filmmaker feels that over the years, his thoughts and ideologies have changed, and he wanted to say a lot of things, which he was able to do in Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani.
