‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai made no sense, Shah Rukh’s character lacked a spine’: When Karan Johar revisited his film
Starring Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukerji in the lead, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai has completed 22 years. Here’s how Karan Johar dissected his debut some time ago.
As Karan Johar’s debut film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai completes 22 years today – the Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukerji film was released on October 16, 1998 – there is an entire generation that counts it as iconic. Its director, however, had taken an axe to it sometime ago, calling it the story of a ‘deeply confused character’ that was played by SRK.
Talking about Shah Rukh’s character, Karan had said in an interview in 2019, “Rahul doesn’t stand for very much. He’s a deeply confused character, doesn’t know what he wants and, really, didn’t do a lot much in the movie. Whatever happened to him was because there were people pushing him - his dead wife’s spirit, his eight-year-old daughter, and Anjali herself. What made him endearing was his charm, his large heart and Shah Rukh’s personal charisma.”
He had added that there was ‘no logic or backstory to the characters’. “You don’t know what Shah Rukh, or anyone else, does for a living in the movie. And the eight letters - one for each birthday - made no sense, either,” the director had said in the interview to Mid-Day.
At an event in 2018 to celebrate 20 years of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Shah Rukh had called the film’s original story ‘utterly nonsensical’. “Karan came and narrated an utterly nonsense crap story to me; which is certainly not the one that finally you people saw in the film. In his strange way Karan, the man with many words tried to impress me with his crap story. So yes, I really did not understand the story when I signed in. and I am glad that I did not get into the story and just went ahead with the conviction of Karan, otherwise the film would have not been the way it came out,” he had said comparing the first draft and the final film.
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