Amitabh's Bbuddah was supposed to be a remake

Amitabh's Bbuddah was supposed to be a remake
Considering his status, every director aspires to work with Amitabh Bachchan. It was no different for Puri Jagannath, who’s helming Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap with the actor. Interestingly, the filmmaker, who started as an associate with Ram Gopal Varma, concedes that his initial plan was to remake a Hollywood Movie with Bachchan.

Puri reveals that he’d expressed his wish of working with the actor to RGV first. “I wanted to remake Taken (2008) starring Liam Neeson, with Amit ji. So I asked Ramu if he’d seen it. He hadn’t, but he suggested that I write something original instead,” says the director.

After a week of brainstorming, Puri shared a concept with RGV, which he felt was apt for a film with Big B. “Ramu liked it and soon fixed up a meeting with Amit ji,” says Puri, summing up how he got the actor on board. Ask him why he was prompted to revisit the Angry Young Man image in his film, though Bachchan had started playing his age with Agneepath, and Puri reiterates, “Having grown up seeing Amit ji’s movies, I wanted to see him as a larger than life persona on screen again. After some time, no one was making those kinds of films with him. So he was not playing that kind of character and no one was writing those lines for him any more,” he reasons.

Tell him that there’s been plenty of buzz about Big B doing action a la Salman Khan in Wanted (2009), a remake of Puri’s Telugu hit, Pokhiri (2006), and the director smiles, “It would be wrong to compare. But it would suffice to say that the character, his guts and the dialogue are the highlight of Bbuddah.”

Further, he maintains that only one line is borrowed from Bachchan’s previous films - ‘Hum jahaan khade ho jaate hain, line vahin se shuru ho jaati hai,’ (the line starts wherver I stand), which is in the promos currently on air. “Apart from this, all lines are new, but retain the essence of his earlier films,” says the director as he gears up for the film’s July 1 release.

news HT