How Aamir Khan's Clause Helped Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra To Complete Rang De Basanti On Time!

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehta in his upcoming biography 'The Stranger In The Mirror' written by Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta, has made an interesting revelation about one of his critically acclaimed films, Aamir Khan-starrer Rang De Basanti.

The filmmaker revealed that the superstar had included a special clause while signing the dotted line which helped him to finish the movie on time. According to the clause, Aamir had demanded to be paid double his remuneration if the film wouldn't be completed on time.

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Mehra revealed in his book, "While signing on the dotted line, Aamir included a clause, which was the reason I ended up making the movie on time in the first place. Here's an example: 'If my fee is 4 crore and you don't pay me on time, then you'll have to pay me 8 crore for defaulting,' he had said. I had never even seen 8 crore till then."

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Further, the Toofaan director was all praise for Aamir and continued, "Aamir is a visionary and understands everything that is going wrong or right with the creative process. Sometimes, tough decisions like 'let's shoot for 10 more days' became easy because Aamir backed the need to do it. Also, he had no ego about whose scene it was. If the scene belonged to the other boys, he would happily stay in the background because the film's narrative was the Bible that could not be tampered with. Aamir's cinematic understanding remains unparalleled in our industry. Without his nod, RDB would have been another dreamer's script gathering the dust of apathy and inertia."

Mehra further mentioned in his book that Aamir imbibed the soul of DJ and Chandrashekhar Azad and gave his own interpretation to it, ranging from the sublime to the mundane qualities of the character.

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"Bharathi (the filmmaker's wife) had given me a quote which she had read, 'There are two primary choices in life. Either you let things be the way they are. Or take responsibility for changing them.' I sent Aamir the same as a one-line brief for his character impetus," the director recalled.

In his book, Rakeysh has also revealed that AR Rahman wasn't his first choice for the film's music. He had almost finalised musician Peter Gabriel, one of the founding members of the British rock band Genesis, to compose music for Rang De Basanti. However, his gut feeling told him that he should work with Rahman and the rest is history.

Rang De Basanti which released in 2006, had an ensemble cast which was headlined by Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor and British actress Alice Patten. The film bagged the National Film Award for Best Popular Film and was India's official entry at the 79th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

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