Veteran filmmaker Subhash Ghai has opened up about an interesting truth from his career, he says he never worked with a ready-made star. Instead, the actors he brought on board were fresh faces at the time he cast them. Between the 1980s and 1990s, Ghai gave Bollywood a string of blockbusters including Hero, Khalnayak, Meri Jung, Pardes, Taal and Saudagar, and in most of these films he chose to back newcomers rather than established names.
Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt and Anil Kapoor were not stars when he cast them
On Kishore Ajwani's show Kahke Rahega Kehne Wala, Subhash Ghai listed the actors he has worked with over the years. He said that Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, and Anil Kapoor at the time of Meri Jung, none of them were stars when he cast them. Among the actresses, he named Madhuri Dixit and Meenakshi Sheshadri, both of whom he has worked with multiple times. He added that even on the rare occasion he did work with a star, he made it clear upfront that they would work together as friends, not in a star-director equation.
This detail matters because it was Ghai himself who launched Jackie Shroff with the film Hero, opposite Meenakshi Sheshadri. The film turned out to be a super hit on release and gave Jackie Shroff his identity in the industry, but at the time it was made, he was simply a new face, not a star.
From Meri Jung to Khalnayak: the films built around Sanjay Dutt and Anil Kapoor
In Subhash Ghai's directorial Meri Jung, Anil Kapoor played the hero, and at that point too he had not attained star status. Ghai later built another major film around Sanjay Dutt, Khalnayak, which also featured Jackie Shroff and Madhuri Dixit in important roles. Released in 1993, Khalnayak turned out to be a massive hit at the box office. Its song Choli Ke Peechey Kya Hai became a super hit of that era, and even today people start dancing the moment its tune plays. In effect, the actors Ghai launched or gave a chance to in one film after another went on to become some of Bollywood's biggest names.
Why Amitabh Bachchan's Deva was shut down midway
In the same interview, Subhash Ghai spoke about Deva, a film that began shooting in 1987 with Amitabh Bachchan in the lead role, but the project was shut down after only a few days of shooting. Explaining the reason, Ghai said Amitabh Bachchan was extremely busy in those days, while his own way of working has always required getting an actor's dates according to a fixed schedule. He preferred making only one film at a time. Around the same period, Amitabh Bachchan moved into politics, which made it even harder to secure his availability. Eventually, Ghai decided it was better to leave the film unfinished. He said, "Rather than the two of us making a bad film together, it is better that we don't make it at all." As a result, this ambitious project with Amitabh Bachchan was never completed, though it had no bearing on Subhash Ghai's career, and he went on to make several more memorable films afterward.
