‘Rajesh Khanna came in an air ambulance, had drip in his hand, could only shoot for 45 seconds straight’: R Balki recalls superstar’s last ad shoot

“I read out the script to him. He laughed. I asked him, ‘You’re understanding the script na?’ He said, ‘Why are you asking me this?’ He was quite ill at that point of time. I said, ‘I’m saying all your fans have gone away, but I’ll always have Havells by me.’ I was actually doing the truth in a funny way. He told me, ‘Babu moshai, you think I’d been a superstar if I didn’t have a sense of humour?,'” recalled Balki on a podcast on the Mama’s Couch YouTube channel.

R Balki shot the advertisement with Rajesh Khanna a few months later, when the latter’s health had declined even further. “He was suffering. We were shooting in Bangalore. He had to fly in an air ambulance. He had an IV drip in one hand. He came to the set in a wheelchair. He could get up, they’d remove the drip, and he could shoot exactly for 45 seconds before he’d have to go back,” recounted Balki.

The filmmaker had the footage of only less than seven minutes for a one-minute commercial, which was “unheard of.” “He saw the ad at the end of it. He was happy. He said, ‘We’ll do a film together.’ He passed away a couple of weeks after that,” revealed Balki. He admitted he hadn’t witnessed the glory days of Rajesh Khanna in the 1960s and the early 1970s.

“It was very emotional because I saw him in the worst state possible, in the most thin, fragile state. He knew he didn’t have much time,” said Balki. The filmmaker admitted he was always a bigger fan of Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna’s Anand (1971) co-star who later dethroned him as the top superstar of Hindi cinema that decade. “That’s also like cinema, no?,” added Balki.

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Amitabh Bachchan has been a part of all R Balki films, playing the lead role in his 2007 directorial debut feature Cheeni Kum, Paa (2009), and Shamitabh (2015), and then doing memorable cameos in Ki & Ka (2016), Padman (2019), Chup: Revenge of the Artist (2o22), and most recently, Ghoomer (2023).