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Actor-director Mahesh Manjrekar who worked with Sanjay Dutt in Vaastav recently opened about his first encounter with the star. The director opened up about the challenges he faced when Sanjay was supposed to make a special appearance in his 2000 film Nidaan. During the conversation, Mahesh recalled that he slipped into depression while getting dates from Sanjay Dutt and when the actor finally showed up to shoot the cameo, he was almost 8 hours late.
Mahesh Manjrekar shared, “Sanjay Dutt was my favorite, I used to have long hair like him back then. It took me one hell of a lot of time to meet Sanju, a friend of mine introduced me to him. I was working on this film called Nidaan which was about a girl who is HIV positive, and she is a big fan of Sanjay Dutt. So I wanted him to do a cameo and told him about the role, and he said yes instantly. Later I called up Sanjay’s manager and he told me there were no dates. I said he had promised, I had gone and recorded the song also, so I lost it. That time I knew Jackie Shroff and he was shooting with Sanjay, so one month later he called me to meet Sanjay on the set of Kartoos. Sanju didn’t recognize me at all, later I reminded him of our meeting and he said he would give me a date.”
“Then another ordeal started, whenever I would ask for a date he would keep pushing, and it reached a point where I slipped into depression. One day he said he was coming, and could only give one day. We had planned for a three-day schedule. Sanju had said he would come by afternoon, we did the lighting and kept waiting for him and he arrived at 10 pm. Later, his team asked if he could wind up by midnight, and I said that we already cut down from three days to one day, and couldn’t finish in two hours. And once he came on the set, he shot back to back and we were done by 4 am. Dubbing was another ordeal, I took Dev Anand’s studio because Sanjay’s house was close by, but he delayed it 25 times and I finally decided to take some mimicry artist, then one day he came. That time his case had started,” Mahesh Manjrekar told Pinkvilla.
Finally finishing the shoot with Sanjay Dutt, Mahesh Manjrekar decided to narrate to him Vaastav. He said, “Till then Vaastav was ready in my head and I asked him if I could narrate Vaastav to him. He called me to Tata Bungalow at 8 pm, he was shooting for Dushman. I didn’t have a script also by then. I wrote something in a restaurant on a waiter’s writing pad and wrote about 25 scenes. The director saw me and waved at me, so Sanju turned back and the expression on his face was ‘What is he doing here?’. He turned around and abused me, I knew this because of Sanjay Chahel’s expressions. He was expecting me to go and ask him if we could meet later, but I knew if I did, he would never meet me. At 12:30 am, he finally gave me 10 minutes to narrate Vaastav’s script to him, at the fifth minute he asked everyone to leave the room and heard the script for one and a half hours. And it blew his mind.”
Vaastav was finally released in 1999 and starred Sanjay Dutt and Namrata Shirodkar in lead roles.
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