EXCLUSIVE: Karan Johar was a ‘bonafide mess’ prior to Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani release: “At the cast and crew screening, I was having a panic attack”

August 2, 2023 - 8:00 PM IST

After seven years, Karan Johar is back as a director. Starring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt in his directorial Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, the film is creating the right kind of noise and receiving positive word of mouth from both critics and audiences. The film marks his 25th year in the film industry as a filmmaker. With the film collecting Rs. 60.22 crore in the first six days of its release, the makers are happy with the response of the film. In an exclusive conversation with Bollywood Hungama, Karan Johar sat down to talk about the unanimous response from critics and the audience, the messaging, and what the film has achieved. Though Karan had shot Lust Stories and Ghost Stories as anthology films, this was his first big-screen entertainer after seven years. The filmmaker was quite anxious about the film prior to its release.

EXCLUSIVE: Karan Johar was a ‘bonafide mess’ prior to Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani release: “At the cast and crew screening, I was having a panic attack”

Speaking about the same, Karan said, “I had the anxiety pre-release, because I was like, ‘Yeah, I don't know what the climate is, will this will be liked, loved or hated, I don't know’. It had built up so much in my own head that at the cast and crew screening, I was having a panic attack. I was like ‘I don't know if this is going to be it’. The one thing that it made me feel was alive. I felt like, decades later, you're still alive as a filmmaker. It still feels like your first film. My hands were trembling, my feet were shaking. And I'm like, this is the best part of it, actually. You can call it anxiety. You can call it stress, but I also call it being alive. As a filmmaker that means you're not taking anything for granted. Not even one tiny thing.”

The filmmaker added that the night before the film’s release, he was a mess. “The night before, I was a bonafide mess. The Thursday night, we had a screening at YRF and the review, and the critic screening happened simultaneously. But that's when I started realizing that ‘Oh, my God, people are actually liking it’ because I started getting messages from members of the media and I've never received certain messages. I got people who were telling me the reaction at the reviewer screening, and I started feeling good, but yet stressed. And then I knew the box office was stressful. That whole night, I didn't sleep. I just maybe half an hour or one hour, I just woke up at 8-8:30 in the morning and I said, ‘You know what, I'm just gonna go play with my kids.’ Because they're like stress buster. But still, my head and heart were somewhere else. I was like breathing and then of course, over the weekend, I think finally on Monday morning, which was yesterday morning, I finally took my first regular breath which was like ‘Okay, now it's not mine anymore. The babies out there. It’s part of the cinema universe. And I can just like, now pray that it grows from strength to strength’. I feel like love has come my way, the messages, the call, just the wonderful things people are saying.”

Adding further, he said, “When you show it to your own people, there is a bias, right? They love you. They want to love your work. We've done research screenings on this. We've shown it to over 500 people before the film's release. We made changes as per that. Nitin, who is a mad genius editor, really sat on the editing process for over six months and kept kind of changing, trying to make it tighter, placing things differently, so that it would work narrative-wise. We went through a lot of those beats because it was a tough film encompassing many interrelationships and many characters and their individual tracks, and then their paybacks and everything happened in one film. It was tough. And I have to say Nitin held my hand through it so strongly, but I have to just say that I had a great team of ADs. I had a great technical team, Amrita, Manish, Manosh, Eka, and Nitin, and they just all came together like one strong unit. I had the best team in the world. I felt like they were like soldiers, especially Shona who's going to be a director now, I don't think I would have managed to kind of reach the finishing line. If it wasn't for the passion of other people. And special mention here to Pritam who actually did the background music also and just worked on it like it was his film, and gave it that extra touch. I feel the film got better because of his background music.”

Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani is currently running in theatres. It also stars Dharmendra, Jaya Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Tota Roy Chowdhury and Churni Ganguly. It was released in theatres on July 28, 2023.

Watch the interview: