The Dangal trailer is out and everyone’s raving about it. It’s trending on Twitter, Facebook and has already clocked over 15 lakh views in less than 10 hours.
It sure is exciting to see Dangal’s trailer living up to its hype and it’s equally interesting to sit back and sip on a mix of trivia and nostalgia about how exactly the germ of the idea of a film like Dangal came up.
The guy who conceived Dangal is Manish Hariprasad, who was a creative head at UTV Motion Pictures. Manish recalls how in January 2013, one of his team members, Divya Rao, came up to him with a news report on the two sisters Babita and Geeta Phogat. While the story of the two wrestlers looked interesting, Manish didn’t think it had the making of a film at that time.
However, a month later they came across another article on Mahavir Singh Phogat, which is when Manish felt that an engaging story could be built around the sisters given the backstory and family they came from.
“We came up with the initial concept and title of Dangal and once we figured what was the take we need to have on this entire story, we needed a great writer-director team to pull off the vision that we had. I knew Nitesh (Tiwari) from before, he was working in an ad agency and I was a client and I thought that a person who is a mix of both - which is a small town upbringing, as well the class and finesse required, was ideal for the project,” says Manish.
Nitesh incidentally was pitching around his second film at the same time (he had co-directed Chillar Party with Vikas Bahl) and took up Manish’s offer to hear out the idea of Dangal’s story provided he could pitch his own film to Manish as well. “I narrated to him the kind of film I had in mind and at the end of it Nitesh liked it so much that he didn’t even want to narrate his film to me,” Manish says chuckling at the memory.
Nitesh immediately started the writing process and took about 9 months to complete the script during which it went through several drafts. During the writing phase, Nitesh and Manish visualised Dangal as a small film and they knew they needed a method actor to play Mahavir Phogat. The character needed to be shown physically transforming over decades – ageing and gaining weight, and the actor who they thought could pull it off best was Irrfan Khan.
By the time the script was done, the duo were confident enough to pitch it to Aamir Khan, so the Dangal script never reached Irrfan.
A request to Ronnie Screwvala and Siddharth Roy Kapur helped them secure a date with the star for a narration. “It was a little daunting, because both Nitesh and I are not from the industry, we used to hear horror stories, which were largely concocted, but basically instances of how much time Aamir takes to revert and so on,” shares Manish.
Surprisingly, Aamir had called them for the narration just 3 days before the release of his biggie Dhoom 3 in December 2013. Nitesh and Manish reached Aamir’s place in the night and the narration lasted for about 3 hours till 2 am much past midnight.
“To our surprise, right there at the end of the narration Aamir said - I would love to do this film. He took a couple of months to figure out his dates and that was it,” Manish recalls.
Getting a nod from Aamir was of course a huge deal. “We were on top of the world. We didn’t know what to do after Aamir said ‘Yes’ to the film. We walked for an hour on Bandstand at 2 in the night just to calm our nerves,” adds Manish.
“Aamir gave us inputs on how he would transform himself. He said he would put on 25 kgs to look like the older Phogat and he would let his hair grow naturally to show the greying. The best thing was that Aamir did not even bat an eyelid when told that he would be playing a 50 - 55 year old,” Manish remembers.
Manish quit UTV Motion Pictures soon after to head Shah Rukh Khan’s production outfit, Red Chillies Entertainment, and hence couldn’t see Dangal through to the finishing line. But he’s thrilled with how the trailer has shaped up.
Manish went on to create Owlet Films Pvt Ltd which he now heads – a company dedicated to developing scripts for films. “Dangal is proof that great stories work. A good script has a life of its own and will always find its way to make a itself into a great film. Which is why in some way Dangal is hugely responsible for the formation of Owlet,” ends Manish.
For now, just like Manish we’re looking forward to see Mahavir Singh Phogat’s incredible story unravel on the big screen on 23 December.
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