Starting from Socha Na Tha and Jab We Met to his latest release Main Vaapas Aaunga, Imtiaz Ali has shown romances across generations and decades through his film. While his latest offering has been garnering love all across for the intensity of its central love story, the filmmaker asserts that he does not claim to have the knowledge of love. “I'm not coming from a point of understanding love into the movies that I'm making,” he says.
Imtiaz Ali reflects on his early works as he shares, “In Socha Na Tha, the confusion of Viren was actually my confusion. Sometimes you commit in a direction and your heart pulls in some other direction. That was something I didn't find an answer for but I made a movie.”
He even has a unique take on the cult classic Jab We Met starring Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor Khan. Imtiaz says, “Jab We Met, in my mind, was not even about a love relationship. It is about two people who meet like strangers and they kind of become like each other. They complete each other and they realize that later. Again, I was not coming from a point of knowing anything about love. Similarly in Main Vaapas Aaunga, when I spoke to partition veterans, I realised that what made them survive through all the agonies and miseries through partition is the love in their hearts.”
{{/usCountry}}He even has a unique take on the cult classic Jab We Met starring Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor Khan. Imtiaz says, “Jab We Met, in my mind, was not even about a love relationship. It is about two people who meet like strangers and they kind of become like each other. They complete each other and they realize that later. Again, I was not coming from a point of knowing anything about love. Similarly in Main Vaapas Aaunga, when I spoke to partition veterans, I realised that what made them survive through all the agonies and miseries through partition is the love in their hearts.”
{{/usCountry}}In Main Vaapas Aaunga, Imtiaz is all praise for his lead pair Vedang Raina and Sharvari for the authenticity and innocence they brought to the story. “The gregariousness and the exuberance of Sharvari was very important for Jiya being the way she is and just the earnestness of Vedang Raina was very important for Keenu and these two are the attributes for which I cast them. When they were together, I have never had a pair in films working so well. You don't act against each other, you act with each other and these two people have proved it,” he says proudly.
Imtiaz also raves about the veteran star Naseeruddin Shah for bringing the depth he did to the story. “Naseer is a fantastic actor and he has gone through the emotions of the story so extremely well, because everything that he is performing, you must understand he is performing from some memory which has been created in his mind. You don't see him do any of those things that he is talking about as they are being done by Vedang in the film. It's a great testimony to how acting is and how imagination is so important. I salute Naseer for having done this part so well,” he ends.