Tigmanshu Dhulia believes Saif’s Bullett Raja has the best dialogues he’s ever written, still can’t believe film flopped

He said in Hindi, “I really like Bullett Raja personally. The writing is really good, I don’t think I’ve ever written dialogues that good — very commercial, hard-hitting dialogues. Everyone did well; Jimmy, Saif. The songs were great. It’s not that the film bombed badly. It did well on satellite, and ‘Tamanche Pe Disco’ was a superhit song. We didn’t fall on our faces. But I was expecting it to do well… But people were like, ‘What in the world has Tigmanshu Dhulia done?'”

Asked how he deals with flops, he said, “I wouldn’t say that I don’t get upset when a film doesn’t work. I feel terrible, I don’t leave my house for three or four days. It’s like when you fail the 10th boards. It’s still the same feeling to this day. I can’t take it when my film doesn’t do well, it upsets me greatly.” He was speaking in context of his 2018 film Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster 3, the least successful entry in the crime drama trilogy. He said that he knew before the film was released that he’d made mistakes on it. “Pata chal gaya tha ke picture theek nahi hai (I knew that it hadn’t come out okay),” he said.

The filmmaker theorised that audiences prefer directors to stay in their lane and not experiment too much. He said that he understands that they want him to stick to crime dramas in the heartland, and he tries to make films in a similar space, but with some variations.