His production house has reportedly rejected 200 scripts in 12 months, including those from Vishal Bhardwaj, Pradeep Sarkar and Priyadarshan. So what’s cooking?
At a time when most other production houses are lining up their projects for 2015 (their schedule for 2014 is already full) and busy putting together their “slate” for the year, employees of Aamir Khan’s production house are twiddling their thumbs.
Aamir, who takes the final call on all projects, has not green-lighted any project since Talaash, which was announced in 2010. This makes it the only A-list production house with no film on the floors. It is also unlikely that any film will go on the floors this year. According to reports, Aamir’s team has carefully evaluated around 200 scripts in the last 12 months. There are 15 submissions every month, and Aamir has declined to put his money into any one of them.
An insider at Aamir’s production house explained that the apparent tardiness is because of the lengthy process that has been put into place for evaluation of scripts. “We receive anything between 10 to 15 scripts a month. Now, we have set up a system to evaluate them. First, the script is subjected to a round of initial scrutiny to see if it should move to round two. If we accept the script, we give the filmmaker a signed letter from Aamir saying that he has accepted the script and that if he finds it good enough, he will get back to the filmmaker,” explained the source.
The selected script then goes through a three-stage evaluation process. “There is a screening again and only a couple of them are forwarded to Aamir. He has a few sounding boards (including his wife Kiran). They go through the scripts that have come for review. A maximum of two to three eventually reach him. He reads them in his free time, and there is no saying when he will get back. It could be six months, or more,” says the source. Since 2010, no script has been able to make the cut.
So what is Aamir looking for? “An original idea… if he gets the hint that the script borrows even as much as a phrase from somewhere, he will reject it,” the source added. Buzz is, Aamir has already turned down several filmmakers. Besides the Kashmiri Glasshouse project, which he rejected recently, TOI has learnt that he said no to Vishal Bhardwaj, Rohit Shetty, Pradeep Sarkar, Priyadarshan and a host of comparatively new film directors. One also hears that a script similar to Chennai Express (a remake of a south film) landed up at AK Productions, though it could not be confirmed. A spokesperson for Aamir confirmed that there are no films on his slate right now, saying: “As a production house, we are not in a hurry to produce a film, we will sign a film only when we find a good script. All our films have been path-breaking ones and we would like to continue the same way.”
Aamir took five years to produce his second film after Lagaan (2001). But since then, he has been producing at least one film every year. Though technically he didn’t have a release in 2009, that was the year when Peepli Live was scheduled to release and it was delayed to 2010. In 2011, he had two films on his slate. But after Taalash released in 2012 after a year’s delay, there are no films in the pipeline.
