Ace filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra who is still soaring in the success of his film 12th Fail looked back at his journey in the film industry and recalled a time when Rajkumar Hirani and Sanjay Leela Bhansali assisted him. Both Rajkumar Hirani and Sanjay Leela Bhansali are now celebrated filmmakers themselves and are almost every actor’s dream directors.
In an interview, when asked about how he met Rajkumar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra said, “Sanjay Bhansali was my assistant. Now he’s called Sanjay Leela Bhansali. He was cutting a trailer for 1942: A Love Story. Sanjay cut a terrible trailer, and I told him it wasn’t going to work. He then cut another trailer, which was also terrible. I asked him who was responsible for this. He said that he knew he couldn’t do it, so he’d asked another person to cut it instead. A skinny boy comes in. Now, I’m illiterate, so I swear a lot. I gave the boy some really bad gaalis.”
He shared further, “They called me back the next day, to watch another version of the trailer. It was an amazing trailer. I said, ‘See, Sanjay? I kept telling you that you could do it’. And Sanjay said that he hadn’t cut this one either, it was the skinny boy. That was Rajkumar Hirani. I went over and gave him a hug, and that’s where the ‘Jaadu ki jhappi’ comes from. I didn’t know this for many years, but Raju told me later.”
Since then Rajkumar Hirani has gone on to make timeless hits such as the Munnabhai films and 3 Idiots. Sanjay Leela Bhansali on the other hand has set a new standard of cinema by giving us Bajirao Mastani, Gangubai and his recent OTT debut Heeramandi.