January 11th, 2009
A month back Kamal Hassan caught up with one of the most brilliant Hindi films of 2008- debutant director Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday. The film is about a cat and mouse game being played by an ordinary man and the Mumbai Police Commissioner, with terrorism as the backdrop.
After seeing the film the grapevine was abuzz that Kamal wanted to play the role of the protagonist enacted by Naseeruddin Shah, with Mammootty in the role of the cop done by Anupam Kher in the original. When Mammootty said ‘No’ to it, Mohanlal was willing to step into the project.
UTV who produced the original was to make it in association with Kamal Hassan and to be directed by a director of the actor’s choice. The idea was to have a Tamil, Malayalam and a Telugu version, with Mohanlal in Tamil and Malayalam versions and Nagarjuna doing the same role in Telugu.
But the latest we hear is that the project is unlikely to take off due to budget constraints. Remember the original was made on a shoe string budget of Rs 3 crore, which made the film a multiplex hit. However the distributors in south feel the subject may not work and were skeptical of a film without any heroines or songs to work at the box- office.
The trade feels it is not practical for an actor of Kamal’s box-office stature to do a small budget film, especially after the super hit Dasavatharam. Today Kamal is as big as Rajinikanth in the global market, and it would be foolish for him to do an experimental film at this stage of his career.
