After the first trial with a hundred people in attendance, he said, ‘Mera paisa wapas kar do, mujhe yeh film nahi chahiye.’ He owned a big company at that time. There was a distributor who had bought the distribution rights for Gadar. Jab sab accha hoga, tabhi ek acchi picture banegi.”ĭirector Anil Sharma, whose son played Tara Singh’s child, says, “We had over 50 trials and the film was not getting sold. You have to make it your own, raise it well. A film is like a child that belongs to an entire team. If the film needs it, it will come from my core. I don’t believe in the concept of showing off how much I know and what all I am capable of. I have done so many films and I always like to go with my heart. To this day, the film works great numbers on TV and people still enjoy the innocence and the heartfelt emotions of the movie.
By the time Gadar: Ek Prem Katha was released, I was already shooting something else. Sharmaji and I are not the kind of people who go to places and discuss a film. Despite the box office numbers, no one acknowledged the film at any award show that year. The industry and the critics didn’t like our film. They took a piece of it home and today, it’s their film. But the day the film was up in the theatres, it won the hearts of the audience. I would have owned two territories’ distribution rights if my friends whose sense of judgement I trusted hadn’t thumbed it down. The initial reaction was, ‘Yaar yeh dated lag rahi hai’. But it didn’t shake our belief in what we had made. Picture lagne se pehle, yeh sab ho raha tha. At a trial that we had, I was advised to dub the film in Hindi before releasing it. When the film was shown to select sets, people found the music and the look of the film outdated, but we loved it. Bring this up and Sunny says, “Humne toh ji wo banaya jo humein accha lag raha tha. Two decades ago, Sunny and Anil faced severe heat and criticism from the industry and critics for their patriotism-meets-romance story set in the pre and early post-Independence years.