Who can forget the iconic villain Mogambo essayed by actor Amrish Puri, and his famous catchphrase, Mogambo khush hua (Mogambo is happy)?
The cast and crew of Mr. India recently came together at the MAMI film festival here before a packed hall of cheering fans.
Boney Kapoor, the film’s producer, announced that a sequel was being planned. “We have seen many fan-made sequel videos on the Net and I have got scripts and ideas from many people. We are definitely working on making this happen,” he said.
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Fans relived moments and memories attached to the film. “I took my daughter to watch this film when she was 10 and since then we tend to watch it at least once a year together; it’s become tradition,” Suneet Verma, a Mumbai-based financial analyst, said.
Nuggets of information on how the movie was made came through. Shekhar Kapur, the director, who was not present at the event but shared a message through a pre-recorded video, said that he felt like he needed to prove a point and make a sensual song out of Katte nahi Katthe , when Boney Kapoor told him that nobody but Firoz Khan knew how to make a woman look incredibly sensual.
Connect with childrenADVERTISEMENT
The movie remains a cult and one of the reasons is the connect it had with children. “We were happy to show a film in which children was shown as children; we did not try to change them or make them look like adults,” said Javed Akhtar, who wrote the script. Being a science-fiction film, it had the protagonist, Anil Kapoor, playing an invisible man.
Anil said, “This movie changed my life. It was written for Amitabh Bachchan and I got to do it with Sridevi. I was being teased that this movie is supposed to be my big one and I am not on screen for most parts. I had to fight to be in the Katte song.”
He got into the original suit and hat that created the persona of Arun Verma, the orphan and street musician, and said: “I still fit into it and this means they have to cast me in the sequel.”
The 1987 film had special effects that were completely captured on camera and no post-production work was done on them.
The movie has a few scenes paying tribute to Charlie Chaplin, with Sridevi playing the comedian. “When I gave Boney the script, I said that the only heroine we need for this film is Sridevi. I saw Himmatwala and was clean-bowled. If you have a talented actor like Sridevi then you want to take advantage of it,” Javed Aktar said.
“The Charlie Chaplin character was one of my favourites, and we shot for a month for this bit. Initially, I was very excited, but after 10 days, I was so tired,” Sridevi said.