Director Manish Gupta: Raveena Tandon and I had some creative differences | Bollywood

Filmmaker Manish Gupta is all set to release his directorial feature film One Friday Night starring Raveena Tandon, Milind Soman and Vidhi Chitalia. Ahead of the release on JioCinema, Manish opened up about his film to Hindustan Times, which is touted to plotted like a Hitchcock-esque suspense film.

In One Friday Night, Raveena plays a Pune-based gynaecologist while Milind Soman plays her husband. It also has Vidhi Chitalia as Milind’s extra-marital love interest who’s also 25 years younger to him. The story takes place on a stormy night, in an isolated villa atop a hill, when a mistress is forced to call her lover’s wife after an unfortunate mishap. While Manish’s previous projects– The Stoneman Murders, Rahasya, Section 375, 420 IPC– were based on true cases, his upcoming is a fictitious story written by Ramesh Rabindranath and Kamal Chopra.

Previously, there were reports about Manish Gupta and Raveena Tandon’s tiff during the film shoot. Does that mean she is not going to promote the film? Manish clarified, “Nothing like that. You can speak to her.”

So, what exactly went wrong? “We had some creative difference initially on the sets. We sorted it that time only. She comes from commercial, mainstream cinema background with dance, heavy costume and music. Whereas I make very realistic cinema-crime thrillers, true stories. It took us some time to come together.”

“Raveena is very punctual. Apart from the creative different, she is good to work with. Woh toh hota hi hai (it happens). It’s upto the director to convince the actor.” When asked if the writer-director is in touch with Raveena, he responded with a yes.

One Friday Night has been shot in Lonavala, near Pawna lake for 25 days during monsoon last year. Talking about approaching Milind Soman for the film, Manish said, “I was looking for someone who should be 50 plus age, handsome, good looking and built well. I saw a video of Milind talking about his wife Ankita Konwar. He was saying ‘My wife is 26 years younger than me but it doesn’t matter.’ The way he said it, I felt ‘Wow this is my character.’ I approached him and he liked the script.”

“During the workshop, I just kept telling Milind to be himself. He has given the performance of his lifetime in this film. Frankly, people have a preconceived notion that Milind is a model. But, let me tell me he acted really well,” he added. Did Milind say it? “Yes, he told me.”

Manish Gupta who is known for his mastery over small-budget, also opened up about big budget films. Recently several Bollywood big ticket films, Adipurush in the latest, underperformed at the box office. Talking about it, Manish said, “They have big budget but very small brain. Jitna paisa hai dimag utna hi nahi hai (They don’t have brain). They make such bad films. But, today’s audience is exposed to Hollywood content on so many OTT platforms. You can’t show them sub-standard quality work and expect them to like it. Audience is very smart. You better get them something good. They don’t work on script. Script toh 2 mins me likh lenge kuch nahi hai (They can write a script in 2 minutes). Everything in big films are build around the actors. But who’s working on the script?”

Citing Adipurush as example, he continued, “Lyrics toh koi bhi likh dega. Lyrics are poetry. But dialogue writing is not easy. Aap kisi bache ko le loge ya lyrics writer ko le loge.. It’s not that easy. I am a dialogue writer myself.”