Making of Salim-Javed docu Angry Young Men: 800 hours of footage, inclusion of KGF star Yash and why Zoya Akhtar didn’t want screenwriters’ kids to direct it

The series is helmed by National Award-winning editor Namrata Rao, who has worked with Zoya on projects like Made in Heaven, Lust Stories, and Ghost Stories.

“She loves Hindi movies, she knew their work and has a great sense of humour that I knew they’d connect with completely,” Zoya said on seeing a director in Namrata, who makes her debut with the Angry Young Men.

“I wanted someone, who is not from the family because I am a director, so is Farhan; Sohail could have done it, Arbaaz does personal interviews, he is good like that. But one of the kids doing it is too personal, you don’t get that gaze, that kind of distance. It was also interesting to have a woman because they have such a male persona, but they are very specifically male — they are not offensive males. I wanted a female gaze on the ‘Angry Young Men’ and she just ticked all the boxes,” Zoya Akhtar told Indianexpress.com.

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Namrata revealed that the team shot the documentary for three years, with both Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar “slowly” getting comfortable in front of the camera to talk about how they came together and how they fell apart.

“By the end of it, we had 800 hours of footage! Which we made into two hours. Geeta Singh is the editor; she is very good with so much footage! When we started, we had this big, chronological map of their lives — how they met, what happened — and we started shooting according to that.

“While I started shooting, I thought a lot of the information wasn’t interesting. What was more interesting was the kind of people they are, what makes them the artistes they are, and how they created these kinds of characters. Then the docu started revealing itself. So it is now a portrait of these artiste.”

The documentary has interviews with Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar, Aamir Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Karan Johar, Shabana Azmi, Yash and many others to cover Salim-Javed’s rise to the top.

Namrata says they were fortunate to get so many people on board, “the wish list never ends.” She added, “We started shooting in the pandemic, so there were a lot of challenges around that. Their contemporaries are also ageing, so there were a lot of concerns in the pandemic, in terms of meeting people, so we had to navigate that. We couldn’t get a lot of people because they are no more, like Prakash Mehra, Desh Mukherjee, Ravi Tandon, Yash Chopra. That was a big loss.”

One of the inclusions that surprised people was that of KGF star Yash, who is seen talking about the work of Salim-Javed in the documentary. Namrata said he was included because his character Rocky from the blockbuster franchise had traits of the Angry Young Man.

“I found his character in KGF quite similar to Vijay. He works in a coal mine and uses that same lift to go down, his mother lives under the subway like Deewaar. He promises his mother that he will become someone… I found it fascinating that people still connected to Rocky’s character so much. That’s what we spoke about. Yash respects their work and enjoys watching their films, it took no convincing to get him on board. He was happy to do it.”

The director said, in mounting Angry Young Men, she was “extremely conscious” that the documentary doesn’t end up becoming a hagiography, something which she communicated to all the stakeholders. “Thankfully all my producers, including Zoya, told me they don’t want it to be a birthday video or a puff piece. They stuck to that and gave me a lot of space. Even though I was apprehensive, all of it went away later,” she added.