You can't get more Bollywood than Farah Khan. Leading film stars flock to her birthday parties and Eid lunches. The top stars line up to shake a leg for a song in Om Shanti Om. Her larger-than-life movies have got her a coveted slot in the Rs 200-crore box office bracket in Bollywood. Not many women directors in India, in fact, none at all, can top that.
"I broke the glass ceiling in cinema with Main Hoon Na. It is the best glass ceiling you can break," she says. "There is no woman director in the Rs 200-crore bracket today and my box office figures are far better than those of any male film director." People love to talk against gender discrimination, she adds wryly, but fail to acknowledge her feat.
Khan, 50, is in Chennai to attend a film award function. Simply clad in a pair of capris matched with a red patterned kurta, she is in her hotel room, all ready for a comfortable chat. She helps herself to tea - no, she doesn't travel with an entourage - and laughs at critics who slam her over the top films.
"I am proud to be a commercial filmmaker. It is these films which keep the industry from going bankrupt," she says. No, she hasn't seen Masaan; she doesn't have time for it, she adds.
After the success of her latest film Happy New Year, the choreographer-turned-filmmaker had "cut down on work" to devote more time to her triplets - Divya, Czar and Anya. But work beckons - and Farah is set to fly to Iceland next week to check locations to choreograph (she choreographs occasionally for a friend or on request) a love song to be picturised on Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol for their upcoming movie, Dilwale.
She has just completed a briefing with two line producers in her hotel room showing her pictures of an ice church, stunning glaciers and mountains on their laptop for likely locations for the song. Tongue in cheek, she says to them: "You cannot have SRK and Kajol making love in a church or will the ice melt while we shoot?"
Khan is happy with life - with the way both her career and family have shaped up. Most evenings are spent playing board games or dumb charades or quizzing or watching a movie with her husband [film editor Shirish Kunder] and children. Her friends' circle today is largely a mothers' group, she says.
"This is the happiest I have ever been. It is a little scary, but I am really content and that can be bad for my creative work. But my last movie did very well, my kids are growing up smart and intelligent and my husband and I spend a lot of time with them. And there is nothing I want now: I am in a Zen-like happiness mood."
So she was torn when old friend Shah Rukh and director Rohit Shetty asked her to choreograph the Dilwale song. "It is an opportunity to see Iceland and shooting with Shah Rukh is always fun for me. It is a special love song and probably their last love song since we don't know when they will act together again. But a part of me feels guilty leaving my children," she reveals.
Shah Rukh, who knows her well (their friendship goes back two decades), warned the director to send her back from location hunting in Iceland soon or "she will start missing her children and stabbing people."
Naturally, no interview is complete without talking about her celebrated friendship - and a now healed rift - with SRK. "He has tremendous energy and is stimulating to be with, yaar," she says. There are no traces of the bitterness that had surfaced some years ago when they fell out - after SRK and Kunder reportedly brawled at a party.
"SRK and I have a long history together," she says fondly, recounting how once he locked her up in his car after she had passed out in a party, to continue partying. He asked his bodyguard to take care of her and then woke up people in Bandra at 2am, asking for a lime to revive her.
Though her next film is a "sweet love story" (which SRK will produce), she wants to pen a "dramatic, special non-comedian role" for him, she says, all traces of motherhood disappearing as her filmmaker avatar takes over.
There was a time when Khan had experienced a low phase in her life when her film with Akshay Kumar, Tees Maar Khan, flopped at the box office. Unused to failure and having tasted success with Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om, and having been a sought after choreographer earlier, Khan was deeply upset by the flak which hit her.
"I don't know why Tees Maar Khan failed. I had fought with SRK at that time, there were enough camps in Bollywood and people wanted me to fail. There was a collective thought - isko maro. That is what happened to Bombay Velvet recently - the film was condemned even before the release."
But enough people, she adds, told her that Tees... was a bad film. "So it must be. I believe everyone makes that one bad film," she reasons, but can't resist adding that her 7-year-old son's friend watches it every day because he finds it funny. (She has asked her son to remain friends with him for life for being loyal to his mother!)
The criticism, however, served as a reality check. "The same people who I had worked with, even foregoing money sometimes, were celebrating my failure with glee," she recounts. She was so miserable, she did not come out of her bedroom for 10 days.
Bollywood is a cesspool, she admits, adding that if you surround yourself only with the film industry, you can be miserable. "Like failure, success is also not constant," she says, recalling how she countered her misery by telling herself that she had seen worse.
Indeed, she had. Khan's childhood was an unhappy one after her film producer father, who had lost all his money on a film, started hitting the bottle. Her mother walked out with her two children, Farah and Sajid, and lived in a small room. She was, however, unable to make a living for them. The kids had to go and live with their father and were shunted around relatives' homes.
But her family, she adds, gave her a lot of independence, allowing her to stay out till the wee hours of the morning, partying and dancing. "I would not do that with my children; I will be following them with binoculars," she says laughingly.
On a more serious note, she recalls how she battled the bad times by remembering how her father died in her arms with not more than Rs 30 in his pocket. This memory helped her get back on her feet after her first failure.
"I told myself that this is not the worst thing that can happen to you," she says. A month later, with the backing of her husband, the spirited director was back writing Happy New Year. F**k it, she told herself; she had not killed anyone.
Despite an unhappy childhood, she points out, Khan has a positive and fun side to her. "My dad used to drink but he had a good sense of humour and made us laugh. That's where I probably developed my black sense of humour from."
Khan holds that she is down to earth because of her middle-class background. She has also seen heroines going mad with success. "They start behaving like they have invented cinema. Have you gone mad, I tell them. There have been legends before you, enjoy the success while it lasts, don't take it so seriously," she recounts.
Though Khan has favourite heroes, she has no heroines she wants to work with on her wish list. "Don't you know, Karan Johar calls me a heroine hater," she asks. But Tabu is a fabulous actor, she adds.
These days, Khan steers clear of controversy, mindful of what her children will read in the press and social media. However, she admits to continue being outrageous and narrates how she got tipsy and tore off the shirts of her actors Sonu Sood, Abhishek Bachchan and others at the wrap up party of Happy New Year.
"Before I could get to Shah Rukh he took off his shirt and gave it to me," she says, her eyes glinting with mischief. She does not use the casting couch, she states with mock sadness. "Though I cast all these hot men, they end up making me their sister or mother."
It is this streak of "madness" that she seeks to capture in her films. Life may be routine - she even goes to the fish market to buy fresh fish (and is royally conned by the fisherwomen) - but her imagination works non-stop. And she reserves all her wild and mad stories of glitzy heists and reincarnation for the masala films she is so proud of.
