Sanjay Dutt dubbed for Zanjeer one day before arrest, Apoorva Lakhia recalls story: ‘He was going to jail the next day’

Filmmaker Apoorva Lakhia emphasised that his equation with actor Sanjay Dutt, with whom he worked on the films Shootout at Lokhandwala and Zanjeer, is as strong as ever. To prove his point, he recalled a story about the actor from the time when he was putting the finishing touches on Zanjeer. Sanjay, the filmmaker recalled, was supposed to surrender before the police after his conviction in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts case was upheld.

But just hours before he was supposed to surrender, the actor called him up and offered to complete work on the film. Apoorva told Siddharth Kannan, “Sanju sir doesn’t stay in India as often these days, he spends most of his time in Dubai. When Maanayata came into his life, we did Zanjeer. Sanju sir is amazing. He was going to jail the next day, and he hadn’t completed the dubbing for Zanjeer. He was going to be picked up by the cops at 1:30 the next day, and he called me and said, ‘Bro, I’m really sorry I haven’t done your dubbing. Come to my house tonight and do my dubbing’.”

He continued, “I went to his house, he cleared the entire bar area, and I took my technician. He dubbed for the whole film on a phone bro. And he was going to jail at 1 in the afternoon. That is the bonding.”

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The events of Sanjay’s life, including his drug abuse and incarceration, were dramatised in the 2018 biopic Sanju, directed by Rajkumar Hirani and starring Ranbir Kapoor. Zanjeer, a remake of the hit Amitabh Bachchan-starrer from the 1970s, was released amid huge fanfare, but bombed at the box office. The remake starred Ram Charan and Priyanka Chopra in the lead roles.