Sriram Raghavan rejected brother Sridhar’s Khakee script, he reveals how it was finally made with Akshay Kumar-Aishwarya Rai: ‘I roamed around for 2 years’

Sridhar Raghavan said he roamed for two years with the script of Khakee, which starred Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn, and it was rejected by everyone, including his brother Sriram.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | May 4, 2023 10:59 AM IST

3 min read

Akshay Kumar (left) in a still from Khakee.

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Writer-filmmaker Sriram Raghavan and scriptwriter Sridhar Raghavan might be siblings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they always like each other’s work or are willing to use each other’s material. Sridhar, who is known for writing TV series such as CID, and films such as Khakee, War and Pathaan, revealed that he had once pitched the idea of the Rajkumar Santoshi movie Khakee to Sriram, only for it to be rejected by the latter.

Speaking to Galatta Plus, Sridhar said that after a decade of writing for television, he just happened to write Khakee and showed it to Sriram first as he wanted his brother to direct the movie: “After 10 years of TV, I was trying to write a script for myself, which is what Khakee was. I showed it to Sriram first, but he said ‘no chance.'”

At this point, Sriram interrupted to remind Sridhar that he had not really rejected the screenplay and had actually ‘loved the opening’ and after having seen Khakee felt that it was ‘one of the great Bachchan performances.’

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During the conversation, Sridhar also revealed some trivia about Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai’s characters, and said he had not written Akshay as a comical character since he was a cop, and neither was Aishwarya’s character the vamp in the original script. The idea to make them thus came from other people. The writer said, “K Subhash was my good friend, he looked at the cop’s character and said why can’t he be funny? He is a human being, so that is where Akshay’s humour came from. And my producer Keshu Ramsay said it was a very dry script. He came up with the idea of Aishwarya being a femme fatale. So filmmaking is a very collaborative process.”

When asked about the making and conception of the movie, Sridhar stated that the film was conceptualised as a train journey and added, “The entire film was set in a train, it was to be a train journey kind of thing. Sriram said ‘How I will make this? I have to make my own film.’ He was a writer, he had written a lot of stuff on his own. Nobody wanted to make it, I was roaming with the script for two years. Then I met Mr Santoshi regarding something which was not related to Khakee. It was sheer chance, and when he asked me about what I was doing, he said he will make it.”

Khakee, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Aishwarya Rai among others in pivotal roles, released in January 2004. The plot centered around a group of policemen whose job was to escort a terrorist from a remote place in Maharashtra to Mumbai. Upon its release, the movie was loved by critics and was regarded a hit.

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