RDB opening figures are highest ever

There was a cloak secrecy over RDB…
There were 4-5 Bhagat Singh films that didn't connect. Then Mangal Pandey failed too. And my film starred Aamir Khan. So any sign of patriotism in my film was read as a danger sign.

Rang De… is ingeniously original.
It's a collection of many circumstances. In school I wanted to join the air force. It didn't work out for me. During my college days in Delhi I was pre-dominantly a sportsman. It didn't work out because I was from a lower middle-class family.

And the first priority was to bring money back into the family. As kids in Delhi on August 15 when we flew kites, we could hear India Gandhi speaking on the other side there were the patriotic songs on the loudspeaker — Ae mere watan, Mere desh ki dharti. We were looking at the idea of our country through a kite.

Then what happened?
The race for Bhagat Singh started. Initially I wanted to enter the race. Then I realized we were all insulting his memory.

Attention was diverted by who would get into theatres first. I moved on. I did a focus group in Delhi and Mumbai. I took a new story idea to youngsters between 17 and 23. Our survey showed that for our generation a relationship meant, 'Let's get married and make babies together.' Not to this new generation.

The youngsters we spoke to were driven by ambition. And I didn't even know how to get on the internet! Anyway, we then moved into surveying them about the country and the tri-colour. The borders of patriotism had blurred. Pagdi sambhal jatta was no more relevant. Not too many kids knew who Chandrashekhar Azad was.

The cast and characters are impeccable.
Yes Aamir hasn't dominated the film. And yet he has brought in everything required. The whole Punjabi accent for his Mona-Sardar character was his idea. There was an attraction between Siddharth and Soha. We couldn't bring it into the forefront because of lack of space. In any case love stories don't have to have a happy ending. Today's generation is very mature about love and its end.

What about the controversial ending?
What about it? The raksha mantri's murder is the pre-climax. After that we've forty-five minutes of story. At the end my heroes realize how futile it was to kill the home minister. Every story has to follow its own course. When heroes in a mythology enter the caves to fight the demons, they've to perish.

Mani Rathnam's Yuva didn't work for me after the heroes went into the parliament. What's jolting the audience is, they love my heroes and they don't want them to die. Too bad. You love and lose the best people in your lives. It isn't a heroic but a poetic ending. But they become heroes because they die.

The MIG crash. Were you ready for the controversies?
I was ready for a long fight. Surprisingly, the censor gave us a certificate subject to clearance from defense ministry. When defense personnel saw it they were a little apprehensive about the sensitive issue. But the film was cleared in three days. The release got pushed forward by a week. Theatres were booked and had to be cancelled. There were 550 screens to explain to. I made a film after four years. This took away the joy of releasing my second film. But I'm not complaining.

Who is the real hero of Rang De Basanti?
Besides Aamir and the other characters? Binod Pradhan's camerawork is comparable with the best in the world. But the real hero is the screenplay. I got so possessed by it, every day I was on the laptop at 4.30 am either creating or destroying.