Mumbai, June 2: Filmmaker Sharan Sharma says he sought inspiration from Aamir Khan-starrer “Lagaan” while crafting the story of his new film “Mr. & Mrs. Mahi”, a human drama set against the backdrop of cricket.
Sharma’s movie features Janhvi Kapoor and Rajkumar Rao as the titular couple — Mahendra, a former cricketer, and Mahima, who is a doctor. After Mahendra spots the cricketing talent in his wife, he encourages her to chase her dream and becomes her coach.
“There’s so much cricket to watch in general, so I’m not going to a theatre to watch cricket, I go there to watch a story. We didn’t want to show the sport like how we see it on TV… We shot it like a scene, the idea was to show the drama of the scene. This was done brilliantly in ‘Lagaan’.
“In ‘Lagaan’, you were following the story, you were not sitting and watching the match. Our inspiration from ‘Lagaan’ in terms of coverage, and the focus was on storytelling, that’s what we were trying to take,” the director told PTI in an interview.
“Lagaan”, a period sports drama from director Ashutosh Gowarikar, was about a cricket match between a group of untrained villagers and their colonial masters. It won an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film and went on to become a blockbuster hit and a classic in the history of Indian cinema.
Sharma, who made his filmmaking debut with 2020’s “Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl”, starring Kapoor, said he was very particular about each and every detail related to the sport in the movie. (PTI)
