In his latest biggie Dunki, director Rajkumar Hirani touches upon the burning issue of human trafficking. The film, which is going strong at the box office, has Hirani working with Shah Rukh Khan for the first time and also stars Taapsee Pannu and Boman Irani, with Vicky Kaushal putting in a cameo.

One of the most important filmmakers in Hindi cinema right from his first film, Munna Bhai MBBS (2003), Hirani, 61, has meshed message with mirth and entertainment with education in all his films, be it Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), 3 Idiots (2009), PK (2014), Sanju (2018) and now Dunki.

A week after the film’s release, Hirani engaged in a freewheeling chat with t2.

It’s been a week since the release of Dunki. What among the audience’s reception and reaction has caught your attention?

A lot of feedback has come in, both good and bad. What made me feel good was the fact that a couple of people said: ‘Thank you for making a different story. You are brave enough to not follow a preconceived trend and go in that path and you try and always make something you believe in.’ So I have been called brave and I am very happy with that! (Laughs)

I have always attempted to find stories which are different stories of India. Otherwise, it is a trap and you can continue making what you think is a trend or make what you have always made and say: ‘Okay, this has worked with the audience, so let’s try the same thing again.’ But you have to attempt different things... some will work more, some will work less.

With Dunki, I attempted something very different. It is a light-hearted film but it is a human story which is serious. I didn’t know how people would accept it. But I am getting a lot of love for it and I am happy that it is doing well. I have never been in the numbers game. I am happy if my current film does well enough to enable me to make my next film. That is enough.

Making each film different from your last one has anyway always been your strongest suit....

I am not doing business. Otherwise, I would have been making one film every year. I take three, four, five years to make a film. I keep looking out for new stories and, honestly, it is difficult. We are sitting on 100 years of Indian cinema and most stories have already been made. The challenge is to find a story that comes from within you.

When a film like Animal works and if everybody else says: ‘Okay, now I am going to make Animal,’ you won’t be able to. That is because the film is from that guy (director Sandeep Reddy Vanga). It is coming from him. He believes in that. Whether it is good or bad, that is a different thing, but it has come from him and that is why it is resonating with people.

You have to make stories you want to make because if I try to do something else, which is not me, I will fail. If today, I say: ‘Action is working, let me try and do it,’ I will fail 100 per cent because it is not me. Because then I am trying to judge what people want. How do you judge? It is not possible because our country is so huge and diverse. Hence, it is difficult to make the film you like. Sometimes it will be universally accepted, sometimes it may not be universally accepted, but certain people will like it. And let’s be happy with that.

You said you are not in the numbers game and yet every film of yours has been a blockbuster. What is the formula?

It is not possible to have a formula. You look at my first film (Munna Bhai MBBS). It is about a 40-year-old man, a gangster (played by Sanjay Dutt), who wants to become a doctor. Now when you look at it, you will say: ‘Oh, obviously it was going to be successful.’ But that was not what many felt at that time. When I made Lage Raho Munna Bhai, every distributor who came to know that I was doing a film based on Gandhi would call me up, very scared and say: ‘Are you sure people will want to see Gandhi in today’s times?’ When I was doing PK, I was told: ‘Oh God, it is about religion and aliens. Who will want to watch?!’ Even when I made Sanju, they said: ‘He (Sanjay Dutt) is a tainted guy, who will want to watch?’ Everything seemed very scary at that time.

Genuinely, I have never believed in the numbers game. I am very happy that Dunki is doing extremely well, but I am not saying my film has to do a thousand crores or two thousand crores. When you make a film, sometimes more people will like it, and sometimes less number of people like it. That is going to happen.

Even with Sanju, though it did the numbers, a lot of people kept on saying: ‘You made it for Sanju (Sanjay Dutt)’. I said: ‘No, I never made it for Sanju. I made it because I like the story.’ I liked what happened to a household where a father and son are at a crossroads. I made it because I felt I should be doing that film. I was told that I had shown only his good life. But no, I had shown that he had kept a gun, the amount of drugs he had done, the number of women he had slept with. I had shown everything.

Before Dunki, you and Shah Rukh Khan had been trying to work together for years. Was the experience of being on set with him all that you had hoped it would be?

Shah Rukh, in one sentence, is ‘pure love’. What is important is the journey of making a film. When you make a film, you spend a year or more with each other, almost 24x7. It is a journey... It is a ‘dunki’ in itself (laughs). You become family and you must enjoy that journey. And forget me, you just talk to Abhijat (Joshi), who wrote Dunki with me. He is mesmerised by Shah Rukh... there is not a day when he doesn’t talk about Shah Rukh. And if I tell him: ‘Okay, I am going to see Shah Rukh’, he will be like: ‘I am also coming!’

Shah Rukh has given us a lot of love. And I am not even talking about the amount of rehearsals he did or the amount of hard work he put into a film like this. For him, this (playing Hardy) was a challenging part. Taapsee (Pannu), being a Punjabi girl, fits her role. The guys who played Balli (Anil Grover) and Buggu (Vikram Kochhar) or even Vicky (Kaushal), all of them are hardcore Punjabis who are from that belt. And so Shah Rukh kept saying: ‘It is the most challenging thing for me. You are making an urban guy like me play a rural guy who doesn’t even know English.’ He told me: ‘It is very difficult to make the world believe that I don’t know English.’ So, he put in a lot of effort to do that and for a director, it was very nice to see somebody putting in that effort. As I said, he has been pure love for me in this film.

Among other things, Dunki is a love story, a heart-touching and ultimately tragic love story and something that you hadn’t made before. What was that experience like and at any point, did you think of an alternative ending, a feel-good ending where they walk into the sunset together?

Even while scripting, this question would come up a lot. There would be things like: ‘Don’t kill her (Taapsee’s character Manu).’ Even after the initial screenings and even now, I keep getting this reaction. But if you look at the story logically, the reason for her to come back to her town is because she is dying and she wants to die here. If I would get her back and then she recovered and didn’t die, it would look stupid.

The other thing I could have done was tone it down... where he proposes to her, gets married to her, and then a voiceover says that she lived for six months very happily with this man and then she died. That would mean that I would be toning down the death. I had to choose between whether to tone it down or let the shock come to people that she died. I preferred the latter, it is a choice I made.

While there are people who wanted a happy ending, there are many more who told me how much the death shook them, and that they were not expecting this. That dramatic shock was far better than toning it down.

It is a story which is supposed to shake you up. I still feel this is the best ending. These are choices you make as a filmmaker. And I feel that if I had given it a happy ending, I would have still been blamed and told that she came here to die, how did she survive?

About three years of research went into Dunki. Was the film inspired by one story or many?

If you just start Googling or even if you go to your archives at The Telegraph and dig out stories over the last six months, you will see there is not one month without news like this. Last month, there was the news of how a boat capsized and many people died in a dunki. Before that, many people were shot at the border of a country. About 15 days before that, many Punjabi guys were trying to cross the Mexican border and one family got caught. Then there was a family that froze on the Canadian border. So not a month has passed where this news is not there. It is just that now it is being noticed because of the film.

It is sad that in today’s times, we are so caught up in our world that we don’t notice all these things. If you dig a little deep, you will see thousands of YouTube videos of what happens. Times have changed and so now, these people on a dunki make their own videos and put them out. You will see Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis putting all these videos out and most of them make these videos to say: ‘Don’t do this. We made the mistake of doing it. Now we are stuck in this country.’

Even in those English classes I have shown, the way Boman (Irani, who plays Geetu Gulati) teaches, there are videos of how these people teach in those classes. They are hilarious! There is one video which I wanted to use in the film but I ultimately didn’t. The teacher gives the students dialogues from Sholay and tells them to translate them into English. So when Gabbar tells Kaalia: ‘Ab goli kha’ where goli means bullet, the students translate it as: ‘Now eat medicine!’ There are hundreds of these hilarious videos. I had enough material to research from.

I made multiple trips to Punjab and went and sat in those classes. I went to those houses and met those people whose kids had gone away. Everything you see in the film is from life. Of course, it is about different families with different stories. When they go outside the country, the first thing they do is seek asylum. They are trained to say that if they are caught. If caught, they should not have any Indian connection... no visas, no identity. All you have to say is that you want asylum. The law says that in six months you have to track this person is from which country and send him back. But these guys are from remote villages and the Indian embassy struggles to find where are they from. There is no identity. In six months, when they can’t send them back, then they have to give them asylum there. They are given papers and they are supposed to report to the authorities every week. They continue staying there and if you end up staying for 15 years in a country, then they have to give you residency.

It is pretty fascinating....

It is. So much came up during the research. Laws are used and misused and human rights issues come in the way. People continue going abroad to find a new life, but they are so innocent that they don’t know that once they go there, they can’t come back to the country at least for the next 15 years. And if they step out, then they can’t go back in. They do menial jobs. They struggle. Some make money, some don’t. I met a lot of people in the UK and the US. We were casting some people and one of them said: ‘My brother is on a dunki right now.’ He made me speak to the guy who said he had reached Mexico. He said: ‘I have been here for two weeks. Now I have to cross over to the US. I will do it, I will go there.’

Did you always want to name the film Dunki?

We didn’t have a title for a long time and then Shah Rukh felt that Dunki was an interesting name. But there is an actor-producer-director called Akashdeep who already had the title and he wanted to make a web series. We met him and he was very gracious and gave the title to us.

Dunki is being compared to Swades, which is one of the most seminal films in Shah Rukh’s career. What do you make of that?

I think Swades is a very different story from Dunki because that film is about a guy who doesn’t have a visa issue. He was a very well-educated guy who was already settled there (in the US). He comes home and wants to stay back.

Dunki is about people who can’t go outside the country, and that is a huge part of our population. In India, only seven per cent of people have passports. To go to a first-world country, the basic requirements are that you have to have a certain amount of money in your bank and a certain level of education. Otherwise, no first-world country will let you in unless they take you as workers. And even then, people struggle. I met some restaurant owners in London who want to take talented cooks from here but they can’t because these cooks will have to clear the IELTS exam.

Every country needs migrants. You can’t function without migrants, I have realised. Take out the Mexicans from America and see what happens. After Brexit, the UK is already suffering. At 10pm, restaurants shut down because they don’t have enough staff. At the airport, there are queues because they don’t have porters.

The majority don’t get visas. This means that if you are born in a country, you are condemned to stay in that country. Whatever happens, you can’t step out of the borders of your country. Unless you have money. At the most, you will be able to go to some visa-free countries, which is happening now. There are so many nearby countries where you don’t require a visa. But if the cook or maid at your home ever dreams of going to America, there is no way they are going to get a visa. Even if somebody supports and sponsors, it is going to be very difficult.

There are no easy solutions to this. We have made borders. But then, Germany had bombed the rest of Europe and today finally, there are no borders between them.

Finally, do we have to now wait for another five years for the next Rajkumar Hirani film?

(Laughs) No, no. I will do something faster this time. That is a promise.

Which Rajkumar Hirani film has impacted you the most?Tell t2@abp.in