Paul McCartney was enthralled by Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz, phoned Bipasha Basu to praise her: ‘India’s Sophia Loren’

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The filmmaker said that he asked the legendary pop star ‘two questions’, one of which left him stumped. “I asked him, ‘Do you dream of John (Lennon)?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I dream of John. He’s too powerful a person not to dream about.’ And then he started talking about how the music would flow through him, and how it would come from ‘up there’ from ‘some mysterious power’. So, I said, ‘If that were the case, Paul, why did you copyright your music? You want stardom and divinity’.”

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison. Express archive photo

He said that McCartney didn’t know how to respond to that. But the Beatle agreed to attend a special screening of Raaz, where Dino Morea was given the duty to translate what was happening on screen to him. But McCartney, according to Bhatt, was vibing on Nadeem-Shravan’s music. He said, “I remember showing Raaz at Dimple Theatre. Very generous guy; he was singing the tune of ‘Aap Ke Pyaar Mein Hum’. When it was time for him to leave for his flight, he reluctantly got up. He was still looking at the screen. I thought, ‘Yeh picture hit hai’, because if you can make Paul McCartney turn around and look at the screen…”

Bhatt said that McCartney was so impressed that he wanted to congratulate Bipasha, who wasn’t there. He called her up and said that she reminded him of the Italian superstar Sophia Loren. Not just McCartney, the Oscar-winning director Jane Campion, who last directed the widely acclaimed film The Power of the Dog, watched a portion of Jism when she was visiting India. “She said this movie is going to be a hit,” Pooja recalled, adding that Campion compared John Abraham to Robert Mitchum.