In an interview, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur was nostalgic as he discussed his genre-bending film, Mr India. The director has lamented the deaths of Sridevi, who played the iconic Miss Hawa Hawai, Amrish Puri, who played the irreplaceable Mogambo, and Satish Kaushik, who played the lovable cook Calendar and has stated that he will not remake Mr India because it will lack the “innocence and naivete” that he achieved in the 1987 film.
When asked if he would be at ease if Mr India 2 came out, Shekhar stated that he would not be because he fears he will fail. “Directing it would be a big problem,” he said. Masoom, Mr India, Bandit Queen, Elizabeth, The Four Feathers, What is Love Got To Do With It — I have never done a genre twice. These are all completely different genres; I fear I will fail if I repeat myself.” “Mr India was not a superhero film; it had universal characters,” he explained.
What Marvel is attempting now, we attempted previously. How many characters are there? (Mr India had). Satish (Kaushik) has died, but Calendar… Calendar is a restaurant in Bangalore, and there was Mogambo, Miss Hawa Hawai, Daaga (Sharat Saxena) and Teja (Ajit Vachani), Dr Fu Manchu, and, of course, Arun. It was Javed Akhtar at his best, so each character spoke differently. I trusted him and said, “Let me go ahead and define each character differently.”
“Today we could have made a (Mr India) universe where Calendar would have his own story, different stories with Miss Hawa Hawai, or Mogambo and his kids — Mogambo and his son, who knows what could be,” Shekhar said, discussing the kinds of films that could come out of the Mr India Universe (possible). Mr India, on the other hand, was probably India’s only universal character film; I have not seen that in another film.
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