Salman Khan: I Was Scared Of Getting Irritated On ‘Sultan’ Sets

Salman Khan on what scared him on the sets of Sultan, and why releasing Raees & Sultan together is not a good idea

Sultan is all ready to set the screen ablaze on Eid but there was a time during the shoot when Salman Khan was wary of playing the role of the wrestler - especially when he was told to fight in a mud pit in nothing but a langot.

It will be a disaster if no one wants to watch the film. The part where I am in a langot is just one section of the film and you got to give it to the wrestlers, who wear that langot to wrestle in front of lots of people. It is difficult. That was the only costume I was worried about. I measured it inch by inch quite a lot of times, otherwise it would look ugly. The fit had to be correct. I thought ho jayega. I walk around without a shirt and a pair of shorts all the time. What is this then? My only concern was that it shouldn’t look vulgar. But when I saw that crowd of people, I was like... what? You are scared of getting irritated, you are scared of one comment being passed by some fan. You don’t want to lose your mind when they want to give you a compliment, but it comes across differently in that excitement. All these things were running in my head. There were many junior artists who I have worked with many times, but there was a lot of crowd which was pulled in to watch the fight in the film. They started taking pictures and the body guards had to stop them, but they leaked anyway.. They had hidden the phones in their underwear and had clicked some photos. These are things that upset me.

Salman Khan, actor

Now that Sultan is finally having a solo release at the box office, Salman also talks about why it is not possible in the current scenario to have a clash of big films like Raees and Sultan.

I don’t think they completed the film, probably that’s why. Honestly, we are about 25,000-30,000 theatres short for such a big release. We have some 5,000 odd screens in the country, which is divided between Hindi, regional and Hollywood films. We don’t have that bandwidth to have such a vast release. You get out of Panvel and realize there are hardly any theatres. Such big films would never be able to come together because he’ll want as many prints as I, which is only fair. Not just me and him, we have nothing in our hand, but the distributors and the exhibitors who know that he could sell in an X amount or I could sell in a certain amount, would want to maximize his profit as well. So business is just going to get divided. Till the time we don’t have 20,000 plus theatres, till that time the industry is not growing at all.

Salman Khan