Sanjay Leela Bhansali ‘had tears in his eyes’, told boss Vidhu Vinod Chopra to leave the country when Parinda flopped: ‘They don’t deserve you’

Also read – ‘Sanjay Leela Bhansali yells a lot now, but he was too scared to speak to Madhuri Dixit when he assisted me’: Vidhu Vinod Chopra

He continued, “It ran for one week in Alankar. And I still remember, Sanjay Bhansali and Rajkumar Santoshi were my assistants then, and we went to Alankar. Those days, there was no internet. So, the only way to know if a film was working was to ask the people who’d just seen it what they thought. Everybody said, ‘Bakwas hai (It’s rubbish)’. I still remember one guy saying, ‘Mat dekhna, Jackie Shroff ki toh heroine bhi nahi hai (Don’t make the mistake of watching it; Jackie Shroff doesn’t even have a love interest)’.”

Chopra said that his assistants were shaken up by the reality check. “These kids who assisted me had tears in their eyes. The became very emotional and they said, ‘Sir, you leave this country, it doesn’t deserve you’. Parinda is a cult film now, but it bombed. It ran for one week in Alankar.” Chopra later remade the film in Hollywood, under the title Broken Horses.

Speaking at the Kellogg School of Management earlier this year, Chopra recalled a story about Bhansali, back when the now-legendary filmmaker was his assistant. “Sanjay Bhansali was my assistant. Now he’s called Sanjay Leela Bhansali. He was cutting a trailer for 1942: A Love Story. Sanjay cut a terrible trailer, and I told him it wasn’t going to work. He then cut another trailer, which was also terrible. I asked him who was responsible for this. He said that he knew he couldn’t do it, so he’d asked another person to cut it instead. A skinny boy comes in. Now, I’m illiterate, so I swear a lot. I gave the boy some really bad gaalis. It was Rajkumar Hirani.”