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Atlee: The ’80s formula will work even 100 years later
Updated On: 19 September, 2023 07:04 AM IST | Mumbai | Priyanka Sharma
As Jawan takes the box office by storm, director Atlee on how he was inspired by ’80s films of Big B and Rajinikanth when creating the Shah Rukh Khan-led actioner
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Jawan still
Most filmmakers would term working with Shah Rukh Khan a dream come true. Not Atlee. The Tamil filmmaker, whose Jawan has become a stupendous success at the box office, had never even dreamt of working with the superstar. Reason? He believed it to be out of his reach. But a call from Red Chillies Entertainment in 2019 changed it. “When I was making Bigil [2019], I got a call from them, saying, ‘Mr Khan wants to meet you.’ I thought it was a joke. But he did want to meet me. So, I flew down to Mumbai, and Shah Rukh sir said he wanted to do a film with me. A week later, he came to Chennai and saw Bigil’s rushes,” recalls Atlee.
The duo spoke for eight months before the director cracked the idea of Jawan—a vigilante actioner that would see Khan in a double role. For his debut Bollywood offering, Atlee knew he had the mammoth task of surpassing the expectations of the superstar’s legion of fans. But the key to achieve it was simple: stick to the basics. “I’ve learnt a lot from [the late] MGR sir, Rajinikanth sir and Amitabh [Bachchan] sir. I’ve seen old, massy films of Amitabh sir. I stick to a basic formula that was used in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s a grammar liked by the audience. It’s not intellectual, but I believe it will work even 100 years down the line,” reasons the director.
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