Akshay and Sonakshi in Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara!, which releases on August 15

There’s been quite a lot of interest around Once Upon Ay Time In Mumbai Dobaara!. What kind of feedback are you getting?

The interest around the film has really picked up. Over the last one week, there’s been a very strong wave on Twitter and it was trending last night. I think it’s peaking at the right time. Till now nobody knew what the film was actually about. With romantic images coming up in the promos, they are sensing a love triangle and are getting quite curious about the plot.

So is it predominantly a love triangle?

Yes, it is a romantic triangle. In the first film, the fight was over the city (Mumbai). In this film, the mentor-protege relationship (between Akshay Kumar’s Shoaib and Imran Khan’s Aslam) remains, but the issue is over a woman (Yasmin, played by Sonakshi Sinha). So, that’s the big difference.

Was it a given that Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai (2010) would have a sequel?

A few things need to happen for a sequel to take place. First, the first part has to work. Second, the first film has to work in a way that it remains in people’s minds. We realised that Part One was something that people would have a long-term affection for… its characters, its music, its uniqueness…. I met so many people who said how they made it a point to watch it every time it was on TV. It was somewhere then that I started thinking about a sequel. The other thing that has to happen for a sequel, at least for me, is the existence of a story that’s different from the first film. Otherwise, there’s no journey for me. A romantic triangle is something that I hadn’t made before. And, of course, there is the money. The temptation to cash in on a successful franchise is always there.

 

Was it because you wanted to make a different film that you didn’t repeat anyone from the original cast?

We were always clear that it was going to be a mentor-protege story again. We wanted to build on that by bringing in the underworld’s fascination for the film industry… in the ’80s, there were stories of so many people who were fronts for gangsters and also stories of so many underworld guys who were in love with actresses. We wanted to take the story into that era and the protege of that era (Shoaib, played by Emraan Hashmi in the first film) would now mentor a new man. We needed Shoaib to be older and Ekta Kapoor (the film’s producer) was in talks with Akshay, who expressed his keenness to work with me. Now was the challenge to cast the younger man and since Akshay was playing the bad guy, we needed someone who could project goodness in an interesting way. That’s how we arrived at Imran. We then needed a woman who would look like a starlet from the ’80s and could have a chemistry with both the older guy and the younger man. I felt that Sonakshi’s casting was quite a breakthrough because she’s got that girl-woman quality.

 

So how much of it is fact and how much fiction?

We’ve moved largely away from fact. Even in Part One… though people still say it was Dawood (Ibrahim) and (Haji) Mastan… we had songs, romance… all of which was fictional. This film has less fact than even the first film. It’s in the Muqaddar ka Sikandar kind of space. Anyhow, I don’t think people are too interested in fact.

 

But everyone’s been saying that Shoaib is actually Dawood…

There are impressions like that, obviously. He’s a mix of certain real-life characters who have left an impact. But if you look at Shoaib just individually, you could even say that he’s like the Amitabh Bachchan of Trishul or Deewaar. There are bound to be comparisons, but the idea is to not make a documentary. Instead, I wanted to capture the era of the ’80s and have a flamboyant villain and a larger-than-life hero. The underworld, if shown realistically, would be bloody, gritty and abusive, which is there in many films. But we don’t do that… we make our films soft and gentle, we make them musical.

 

What do you have to say about a film like D-Day where the character is obviously Dawood Ibrahim and yet he isn’t named?

I don’t want to comment on anyone else’s movie, but it’s a tricky thing, you know. Some people make realistic films, some don’t. If you ask me, I don’t think it really matters because at the end of the day, it’s just drama. I remember in Deewaar, it was said that Bachchan played Haji Mastan. But was Mastan’s brother a cop? He wasn’t.

The one thing about the first film that stood out was Ajay Devgn’s intensity. Does Akshay bring in the same intensity, or was it something else that you were looking for from him?

They are two different men, but what they have in common is the largeness of the impact that they make. They are larger-than-life stars and they both bring to the screen the kind of quality that Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna did. In their individual capacity, they are different and have their own space. In both films, we have managed to push the actors to their maximum. For me, Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai was Ajay’s finest performance and I think that people will say that about Akshay as well. It will definitely stand out from all his other works.

 

The film’s title has undergone a lot of changes over the last few months. Is that something you’ve been comfortable with?

The way it works is that when you are married to someone, both personally and professionally, you have to make space for a few things. I have my quirks and Ekta has hers. She gets irritated with certain things that I do and the same goes for me (laughs). She may question a few things that I do, but she respects my vision and I respect hers. The first change, however, when we shifted from Again to Dobaara wasn’t because of numerology. It was a marketing call where we felt that it would not connect as much because it was a very long English title. Also, the word ‘dobaara’ brings in a lot of spunk. However, after that a few changes have happened at Ekta’s behest and while I haven’t been too comfortable with it, I just want the film to work.

Priyanka Roy
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