‘The guy who was funding Shah Rukh Khan’s Bollywood website got arrested’: Wedding Filmer recalls working with SRK for a decade

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Vishal said that he wrote an application, and got the job. “I even got to speak to him. At first I thought it was a hoax. But I landed there, and three months later, the company shut down because the guy who was funding it got arrested and the dot com thing crashed. I thought I’d have to go back. But he liked me, because I was good at what I used to do. He was making Asoka, and he said, ‘Don’t go back, I’ll move you to Red Chillies, and you come and make this movie with us.’ And then I kind of wiggled my way into Bollywood,” he said.

But because Vishal was working on a Ghanaian passport and hadn’t bothered to renew his visa, he was deported from India and banned from returning for four years. A couple of years later, however, Shah Rukh was able to use his connections to get the deportation reversed. Vishal continued, “Shah Rukh was working on this movie called Ra.One, he was like, ‘Come work on Ra.One’. But that movie had 36 cameras, and I didn’t really like the script. I wasn’t sure about the people who were working on it… It’s two years of your life, so I decided not to. I decided to start this company instead.”

Vishal has now created wedding videos for celebrity couples such as Anushka Sharma-Virat Kohli, and Deepika Padukone-Ranveer Singh, among many others. He said that the most that he has ever quoted for a video is around Rs 3 crore, and that he often turns down gigs if he doesn’t gel with the couple, or if he’s made prior commitments.