Anil Sharma: People said Sunny and I were finished

A still from Gadar 2

Seated in his palatial Andheri office, Anil Sharma smiles from ear to ear. Congratulatory messages from mediapersons have been greeting him since a few hours now as his latest film, Gadar 2, crossed the coveted Rs 500-crore mark.

The Sunny Deol-starrer is now only the second film to achieve this feat, with its predecessor, Pathaan, also hitting the mark, this year itself. Drawing parallels between the two films is hence, only inevitable. But, Sharma doesn't entertain questions on the comparisons. "The industry must walk together," he says, adding, "When the makers of Barbie and Oppenheimer praised each other, why shouldn't we do the same? I was happy to hear that Shah Rukh [Khan] loved our film. He has a massy taste. Similarly, I knew that Pathaan would be a hit as soon as I saw the trailer."

Anil Sharma

Sharma evidently has his finger on the pulse of cinemagoers - while he had anticipated Pathaan's success, he was also certain that his drama would "be a blockbuster", even though few believed that a 22-year old story could be successfully revived. "Nobody said it to my face, but I learnt of people's opinions from newspapers, and YouTubers. They'd say, ‘Anil has nothing left to him, except for Gadar'. Or, ‘Sunny Deol is failing, and Anil Sharma is finished. They have aged'. Some also felt that we were tarnishing the image of the first film. But I wanted my work to speak for itself."

While the first instalment was set in the post-Partition period, and narrated the love story of an Indian Sikh man and a Pakistani Muslim woman, the second part sheds light on the man's visit to Pakistan to save his child, played by Sharma's son Utkarsh. The director was certain that people would lap up the father-son relationship drama. "This story is similar to a chapter from the Mahabharata, where Abhimanyu is trapped in the Chakravyuh. But, in our film, Abhimanyu is rescued by his father. We didn't design the story contemplating [how much screen time] we should give Utkarsh. We simply went with the flow," he says, adding that reports of him favouring his son by giving him significant screen time, bothered him.

While the narrative was the actual hero of the film, Sharma says that his decision to showcase the love between India and Pakistan, served him well. "We neither showed any hatred towards Pakistan, nor indulged in the narrative of the Hindu-Muslim [divide]. We only spoke of love. We haven't shown unnecessary violence, but chose to depict positive Pakistani characters."