Exclusive: Happy New Year is my most accomplished film, says Farah Khan

The timing for her to make this movie couldn’t have been better. Farah Khan‘s golden run as a filmmaker, after the hugely successful ‘Main Hoon Na’ and ‘Om Shanti Om’, came to a screeching halt when her third film ‘Tees Maar Khan’ (2010) had a disastrous reception, both at the box office and with the audience.

The filmmaker confesses it was a difficult phase. “For over 20 years in my career in the film industry, I’ve always had an upward graph with one success following the other, until ‘Tees Maar Khan’, she says. She was especially hurt with how a large part of the film industry tore her film down and celebrated its failure. But ‘Tees Maar Khan’ also taught her some big lessons. “It taught me that every time I curb my instincts, things go wrong,” she says. After ‘Tees Maar Khan’, Farah Khan spent the last four years judging reality shows on the small screen and working on Happy New Year, which releases on October 23.

With this film, Farah Khan thinks she has ‘settled in’ as a filmmaker. “‘Main Hoon Na’ will always be special since it was my first film but in my subsequent films, I was trying to show off with gimmicks that didn’t aid the narrative in any way. That way Happy New Year is my most accomplished film,” she explains.

‘Happy New Year‘ is a quintessentially Farah Khan movie in terms of scale and the larger-than-life canvas. It will be filled with industry-inside jokes that one associates with her films, and even her signature closing credits that show the cast and crew in an imaginative fashion. Happy New Year is also her most ‘modern’ film. “Unlike my earlier films, this isn’t a throwback to an era of Hindi masala movies. A part of Happy New Year is inspired by western pop culture, the pop music videos of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Duran Duran in the ’80s,” says the 49-year-old. It was around the same period when Khan was in college that she took to dancing after being inspired by MTV-driven music videos. She went on to become one of Bollywood’s most successful choreographers.

Happy New Year is a sort of homecoming for Khan who teams up with long-time friend Shah Rukh Khan after famously falling out with him. She says that the time spent during shooting and promotions made for some great professional and personal bonding with SRK. “We have this actor-director-producer synergy that we are proud of. All through the process of the film we were happy, making fun of each other,” she says.