Farhan Akhtar Change Dil Chahta Hai Climax Akshaye Khanna Alone

Twenty-five years ago, a generation found itself in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai. With its fresh aesthetic, sharp writing and distinctive visual language, the film not only changed the landscape of Hindi cinema but also offered a new way of looking at adult relationships. As Dil Chahta Hai completed 25 years, Farhan opened up about what he might have done differently if he were directing the film today. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, the filmmaker admitted that there are certain moments he now views differently with the benefit of time.

“Now enough time has passed for me to think of one thing that I would change, or maybe two, actually, that I would do differently. One is, I would probably resolve the Aamir and Preity’s relationship slightly differently from how I did. I feel that the drama of that moment is effective, of course, in the film, but I feel maybe the drama was a little bit overplayed in the way I constructed it, completely as a director. I feel I constructed it a little bit away from the drama of the rest of the film. So, for me, it stands out a little bit, the wedding scene. So maybe I would do that a little bit differently, in terms of not pitching it so high on drama, like the way it was.”

Farhan also feels he may have been better off leaving Sid, played by Akshaye Khanna, without the suggestion of a romantic resolution. In the final moments of the film, Sid, after moving on from the passing of Tara (Dimple Kapadia) is shown with another woman. Looking back, Farhan feels the character did not necessarily need that hint of a conventional happy ending. “I think I would have left Sid alone at the end. I think that giving that little hope of a happy ending for his life, he was happy regardless, which I think about now, then maybe he didn’t need to see one girl at the end and think that there’s, you know, maybe there’s some pot of gold at the end of this rainbow for him.”

Recently, in an exclusive conversation with SCREEN, Sonali Kulkarni, who played Sameer’s (Saif Ali Khan) love interest Pooja in the film, also looked back at her experience of being part of Dil Chahta Hai. Sonali was cast by Farhan’s sister Zoya Akhtar, who also served as the film’s casting director. “I interacted with Zoya first because she’d seen some photo of mine. She kept fighting with the person who showed her the photo, ‘This is not Sonali. I have seen her in arthouse cinema, and she doesn’t look like this.’ It was a typical photo shoot. She connected with me and asked me to audition. We laughed so much while canning the audition. Zoya was giving me the cues, and we improvised. I loved the vibe.”

For Sonali, however, what stood out about the film was not just its style or the scale of what Farhan was attempting as a first-time director. It was the atmosphere on the set and the people who created it. “People mattered quite a lot on Dil Chahta Hai set. What I remember about Farhan and Ritesh (Sidhwani, co-producer) is their friendship. They’re genuine friends, who don’t talk about how thick they are.”