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Filmmaker Karan Johar recalled a tense conversation that he had with Aditya Chopra, about one scene in his 2006 film Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, in which Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukerji’s married characters commit adultery. Karan said that Adi Chopra was concerned if Indian audiences would accept this, and in hindsight, the filmmaker said that the YRF head honcho might have been correct. Karan recalled how married couples come up to him and tell him that they can’t admit to liking the film, because that would lead to questions from their spouses.
On journalist Anupama Chopra’s All About Movies podcast, Karan was asked about the portrayal of intimacy in mainstream Bollywood films, and the infidelity scene in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was brought up. “Oh dear, I don’t think I’ll ever get over that,” the filmmaker said. “There’s a story about that.”
He continued, “I was shooting that sequence, and I was at this big location that was snowed out, and Adi called me. He said, ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of days, and it’s very strongly in my head. I don’t think they should have sex. I feel like India will not accept it. They should come to the point, and retract, because they’re guilty about it’.”
Karan theorised that he had lost his father in 2004, and that he was feeling ‘rebellious’ at the time, because he knew that his father would never have allowed him to make a movie like Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Karan continued his conversation with Adi, “I was like, ‘No, I’m going to do it. How can you be in a relationship and not have sex?’ So, we had this big fight over the phone, and I was rebellious about it. Much later, when I sat down with the film, and I thought about it, and I think back and feel that he was right. Not optically or anything, but commercially. I feel the country would’ve been far more receptive of the love story had they not gone ahead with a physically intimate relationship.”
Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was a hit, but it didn’t perform to the level of Karan’s previous film, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham. Karan has said several times that if there’s one film that he would like to go back and make changes to, it’s Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. He said at a press event in 2016, “I will always regret some things… I think Kabhi Alvida has some of my favourite moments, personally, as a filmmaker. I regret… I think it’s a flawed film. And I think the mistakes in that film are entirely mine. I think I tried to do two things; I tried to do something fresh, and interesting, and ground-breaking, but halfway through I also got scared. So just like my sun sign, which is Gemini, I became two people. And I think I should’ve just been one person, with one solid conviction.”
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