THE MAN WHO GAVE PATHAAN ITS HEARTBEAT

‘Every story has a heartbeat of its own.’ ‘Sometimes you want to go thak thak thak and finish the screenplay fast.’ ‘In other stories, you go thak (pause), thak (pause), thak (pause). That also works.’ ‘Pathaan has a different heartbeat.’

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What is the secret of Pathaan’s huge box-office success?

It’s all in the writing.

The film moves at such a fast pace that it keeps audiences at the edge of their seats.

It’s no wonder that Yash Raj Films appointed the film’s scriptwriter Shridhar Raghavan (who has written films like Khakee, Apharan, Chandni Chowk to India and War) as the mentor for its spy universe; his next project is the Salman Khan-starrer Tiger 3.

In the first part of this interview, Shridhar tells just what worked in Pathaan’s favor.

When Director Siddharth Anand gave you the story of Pathaan -- where the hero works for India’s intelligence agency and the heroine is a Pakistani agent of the ISI, which is known for creating terror activities in India -- were you convinced?

In today’s political times, was it difficult for you to show an ISI officer falling in love with a RAW officer?

When we were writing, we were writing an entertaining comic type of story.

There were no subtexts.

If you see the Tiger series, you will see that this was done in the past too.

I have grown up on Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra, and Vijay Anand films. That is the only filter I used for writing.

As an audience, I must have fun watching the film.

In the film, one gets the feeling that no one is wrong. All characters feel they are right and somewhere. You sympathise with John Abraham too, who plays a villain, because his agency wronged him. Was it intentional?

Even a villain is a hero in his own head.