‘There’s a difference between sincerity and obsession’

Randeep Hooda is making his debut as a director with the upcoming ‘Swatantra Veer Savarkar’, but for a large part of the film’s production, director Mahesh Majrekar was helming the project. It was in May 2021 that Mahesh was announced as the director, but by September 2022, he had officially quit the film. In a new interview with a popular entertainment portal, Mahesh stated his reasons for backing out of the film.

Mahesh said that he was hurt, as it seemed like ‘Randeep had planned to slowly ease him out of the film’. Mahesh claimed that the biopic was his project and he was the one who brought the producers Anand Pandit and Sandeep Singh on board and then cast Randeep in the lead role. The director said that when he signed Randeep, he seemed sincere, but eventually, Mahesh realised that they were not seeing eye-to-eye even at the scripting stage.

After the two somehow managed to resolve their differences regarding the script, more issues cropped up because Randeep, according to Mahesh, ‘wanted to incorporate Hitler, the King of England, the Prime Minister of England, etc.’ The filmmaker added, “He wanted to incorporate Lokmanya Tilak’s ‘Swaraj is my birthright and I’ll get it’ episode. I wondered how all this matters to Savarkar’s biopic.”

Mahesh claimed that Randeep even wanted to include factually incorrect episodes in the film, like a scene between Bhagat Singh and Savarkar that left him ‘appalled’. The director said that Randeep ‘got too involved’ and every time he went to meet him, he’d be dressed as the freedom fighter. “I didn’t want to communicate with Savarkar. I wanted to make a film on Savarkar. This left me no room to reason with him,” he said.

“He then started telling me that I can shoot in a particular way and then put the dissolve transition. I was like, ‘Now he’s telling me how to make films’. I made it clear that I was going to direct my way. It was my story. I wanted to make the film my way. That’s why I got the producers on board. I am not questioning Randeep’s sincerity. But there’s a difference between sincerity and obsession.”