With Salman Khan’s ‘Veer’ being the latest talk of B-town, news has it that the eccentric actor is quite cautious in handling his dream project!
The hunk of an actor seems to have learned an important lesson from ‘Jodhaa Akbar,’ an Ashutosh Gowariker’s period film that garnered huge critical acclaim but was simultaneously blasted for being a lengthy flick. With Salman’s ‘Veer’ being an epic film, the actor has asked his producers to keep a check on the movie’s time limit by keeping it strictly restricted to two and a half hours.
Talking to a news daily, a source from the production team of ‘Veer’ said, “Salman has requested us to ensure that the film doesn`t turn out to be too long because he says that the audience is not used to such long films. He knows that the days of ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ are over when the audience had the inclination to sit for hours to watch a film. He wants the film to be around 2.5 hours.”
Even Salman confirmed the news of strictly adhering to the time format as he said on his blog, “When you watch a period film, for some strange reason, it is believed that the film is going to be three hours plus, with flowery dialogues, very heavy with no humour in it but I assure you ‘Veer’ is not like them. We are trying to keep the film to about 2 hrs 35 minutes approx. There is so much of scale and bigness in the film that we don`t want to compromise and lose out on anything.”
The source continued, “The film had been five hours long had we stuck to the original script that Salman had written. Also, the film`s budget would have been not less than Rs 100 crores. Interestingly, Salman was fine with the massive changes the script went through.”
For now, the script has undergone umpteen changes as Salman added, “Yes, the present script is a lot different from what I originally wrote fifteen years back. I knew that the script had to be changed. There were certain changes I liked, there were some that I hated. But at the end of the day it`s a creative process and Anil Sharma (the director) had the last word in whatever creative differences we had.”
