Badhaai Ho director Amit Ravindranath Sharma has started work on his next film — a biopic on unsung Indian football coach Syed Abdul Rahim. The film stars Ajay Devgn in the lead role and will roll out in mid-2019. Asked about attempting a sports drama for his next — a genre that has become a steady formula in Bollywood with films like Dangal, Soorma and Gold — Sharma assured that his film will adopt a fresh grammar and treatment.
“I approach a story without any prejudice. I intend to do the same with this script, and more so because it is based on a great man’s life. I will try to give the story a treatment that justifies it and choose a certain grammar that will help in its narrative. Ajay has a great fondness for football and I am excited to work with him,” Amit said, informing that he started prepping for the film with his screenwriters Saiwayn Quadras and Ritesh Shah by meeting players from that era (1950-1963).
Made on a moderate budget of 29 crores, Amit’s previous venture, Badhaai Ho, has raked up more than 200 crores at the box-office and is hailed as one of the biggest blockbusters of 2018. Asked if he had anticipated the commercial success of the film, Amit said, “We were not anticipating anything, but there was a belief that something good would happen. When we first started work on this project it was enticing. This is the first feature that our company Chrome Pictures is a part of and it feels great to see that people have received Badhaai Ho with so much enthusiasm.”
Coming from the world of advertising, Amit supposedly worked on 1800+ advertising films. “Ad films help us understand the audiences better, as well as understand the craft of filmmaking,” Amit noted, admitting that feature films are his main focus at the moment.
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