Sujoy Ghosh reacts to Jaane Jaan’s success, says people stop and ask him ‘body kahaan hai?’

“Everywhere I go, people stop and ask me, ‘Body kahaan hai?’ It’s good fun. And that’s what art is all about, whether you make it a painting or book or sculpture, unless people talk, kya faayda?” he told Bollywood Hungama. He added that for him, the purpose of a film is to make audiences ‘think’, adding that when he read the original book, it made him question a lot and he wanted to pass that on to the audience. Talking about the love he’s been receiving for Jaane Jaan, he said, “The word has spread out and I have been getting calls from all over the place. This has happened with all my films. It is the audience that has carried the film (and made it a success).

Sujoy Ghosh also gave insights about his characters and how he created their back stories. For Jaideep Ahlawat‘s Naren, Sujoy shared that he must have been shaped by his academically inclined parents. “You have to delve into his parents’ principles and why they named him Naren. When I went back, I found that Naren’s parents were followers of Swami Vivekananda. Hence, he was named after Swami Vivekananda (whose real name was Narendranath Dutta). In fact, he tells his student ‘Apne aap ko upar karo, duniya tumhare liye neeche nahin aayegi’. This is a quote by Swami Vivekananda,” the Kahaani director said.

He also added that in the original book the deceased man was not a policeman and gave reasons as to why he chose that profession for Kareena’s husband. “If a police officer has disappeared, then there definitely would be an enquiry into it. A lot of people go missing and nobody gives a sh*t about them. But we felt the need to adapt in such a way that if Ajit went missing, then there will be people who would come and look for him,” Sujoy mentioned.

On a final note, when the filmmaker was asked if he plans to write Jaane Jaan 2, he replied, “We’ll see. Right now, we are all in a happy stage. We all want to be a little happy right now. Fir kaam chalu karenge (Then we will start working).”