20 Years of Lagaan EXCLUSIVE: Aamir Khan – “I have never tried to calculate or second guess on how it will do in the box office”

June 15, 2021 - 11:00 AM IST

Aamir Khan starrer Lagaan completes 20 years today. The actor, celebrating two decade of his film, took us down memory lane by sharing his experiences, anecdotes, and memories while shooting the movie. He also shared his feeling about not winning the Oscar and how he looks at it now.

20 Years of Lagaan EXCLUSIVE: Aamir Khan – “I have never tried to calculate or second guess on how it will do in the box office”

During a media interaction, Aamir Khan was asked how did Lagaan changed the way he looked at the stories and that if he felt the need to capture the imagination of the whole of India. He said, “Let me say that my attempt has always been that, so no matter what film I am doing, I am trying to entertain and connect with audience irrespective of language, if you don’t know Hindi and you from the South of India or you’re from some other part of India where Hindi is not spoken, I was hoping like every filmmaker hopes that language will not be a barrier.”

He added, “For me, selecting the stories has been on my personal excitement. I have never tried to calculate or second guess on how it will do in the box office. That’s very hard to know how it will do at the box office but I know this much that I love this. Now you will ask me what will be Taare Zameen Par’s box office? What will I answer? What will be its box office, what am I suppose to answer? But I love the story and I want to make it.”

He further went onto explain, “When I did Delhi Belly in English language, how many people in India spoke English? So I didn’t think of the box office, I just liked the story. Peepli Live, I loved the story. Now if I will consider its box office first, then I won’t produce the movie. I’ll be like it doesn’t seem to have any potential, so don’t make this. So I don’t go on that basis. I go with my gut about what I like and then I try to see how much is its potential, so we economically spend that how we see that we could roughly gain from it.”

“You can never know the exact, but suppose I am doing something like Taare Zameen Par, no one knows that Taare Zameen Par will eventually go on to make Rs. 80 crores. At that time, it was a lot, it was the second-highest film in the year. But at that time, I did not know that if you ask me how much will it make, I’d say I don’t know, it might do Rs. 15-20 crores. So we should Rs. 15-20 crores average; at least we’ll be safe we’ll spend Rs. 15-20 crores and we’ll make up that much. Atleast it’ll be safe knowing I won’t lose money is what I was thinking. I don’t want the person to lose money but success and all I don’t know, so I always followed this as my principle that if I will love the story I will make it, no one should lose money.”

Coming back to Lagaan, the film celebrates two decades today. It revolved around the British Raj when a farmer named Bhuvan accepts the challenge of Captain Andrew Russell to beat his team in a game of cricket and enable his village to not pay taxes for the next three years. The film starred Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley and Paul Blackthorne.

Also Read: 20 Years of Lagaan EXCLUSIVE: Aamir Khan – “Almost every day, we used to have a doubt that we made a mistake by taking on this monster”