“I’m in the middle of a storm,” says actor Aamir Khan over Zoom from Mumbai in early August. He is taking a break from a visual effects studio where he is applying the final touches to his latest movie, Laal Singh Chaddha, with only two days to deliver the finished product. “I work for 36 hours, then I sleep for a couple of hours, then I continue.” His work paid off: it opened last week, in time for India’s 75th Independence Day today.
The movie is a Hindi adaptation of the Oscar-winning 1994 Hollywood hit Forrest Gump. “I am very nervous,” says the 57-year-old about the release (which he is also producing) — it will compete head-on with megastar Akshay Kumar’s family comedy Raksha Bandhan (Bond of Protection) at the holiday box office. “We want to see how close we have come to what we had in mind when we started the process, when we just had a script in front of us.”
As in the original, which starred Tom Hanks, Laal Singh Chaddha (played by Khan) is a big-hearted, dim-witted naïf who bumbles through history, inadvertently affecting pivotal moments while accumulating fame and honours along the way. Khan is incorporated into archive footage in a faithful Indian rendition of the US blockbuster that recycles most of the key plot points, including the childhood leg-braces and the bearded, bedraggled protagonist’s eventual marathon run across the country.