The recently released film ‘Bhool Chook Maaf’ is being liked a lot. The story of this film has been written by Haider Rizvi along with the film’s director Karan Sharma. Haider Rizvi, who has worked in the IT sector, can be gauged from the fact that he mistook Sunny Deol for Govinda after watching his film ‘Yodha’. Recently Haider Rizvi spoke to Dainik Bhaskar. Here are some special excerpts from the conversation with him.. Whose idea was the film ‘Bhool Chook Maaf’? This idea was of the film’s director Karan Sharma. When he shared the idea of the film with me, I found it very interesting. This film is on a time loop. Many films have been made on time loop all over the world. 2-3 films have been made in Bollywood too, but they were not successful. The challenge for us was to present the story in such a way that the audience does not find it strange. For 13 days we prepared the final drop of the story together, and on the 15th day we were in front of Dinesh Vijan with the story. Why did you choose Banaras as the backdrop of the story? Karan had asked me to choose Banaras as the backdrop of the story, but when I hear the name of Banaras, I get very excited. Our village is only 100 kilometers away from Banaras. If someone fell ill there, they would be brought to BHU. I have seen Banaras from childhood to youth. The humor of Banaras is such that you will laugh when you see two people fighting with each other. You do not need to work hard to write dialogues on that backdrop. The humor comes automatically as soon as you write Banarasi dialogues. That is why I also became interested in bringing the story to Banaras. You have written the story of the film with Karan Sharma, was there ever any conflict over the script? We are friends first, so there was no conflict over the script. In the industry, writers and directors understand their respective responsibilities. The director is called the ‘Captain of the Ship’, and we worked with the same coordination. Once the script reached Karan, we left everything to him. Did Rajkumar Rao have any suggestion regarding the story of the film? From narrating the story to Dinesh Vijan to mailing the final script, no one made any changes. However, this happens very rarely. When I went to narrate the script to Rajkumar Rao for the first time, I was a little nervous. After listening to the script, Rajkumar completely got into the character. He spoke such a dialogue as Ranjan, which even I had not thought of. How was your journey before ‘Bhool Chook Maaf’? I worked in the IT sector in Gurugram and Delhi. In 2011, I told my father that I am leaving the job now. Don’t ask what I will do. I had decided that I will become a writer, but I did not know in which field I would do writing. I had not thought about films at that time. When did you get interested in films? For 18 years, we were not allowed to watch films in our house. The first film I saw during engineering was ‘Yodha’. I was mistaking Sunny Deol to be Govinda. From this you can understand how much knowledge I must have had about films. When I started watching movies, I got so addicted to them that I would sometimes watch three shows in a row. From there, I started getting inclined towards writing. When did you come to Mumbai? I had come to Mumbai before Covid. The people of Laughter Challenge came to know about me that I have a good sense of humour. They contacted me and I wrote that show. I also got very good money for it. I never had such a struggle that I came to Mumbai wearing slippers. I came from Delhi driving my own car. 6 months were spent in Laughter Challenge. How did the people of Laughter Challenge come to know about your style of humour? The punch lines of humour written by me used to come on 92.7 Big FM. I used to design all its national shows. Something or the other used to come on the radio throughout the day. Someone must have told the people of Laughter Challenge from there. Well, after coming to Mumbai, the biggest contribution came from Anubhav Sinha and Subhash Kapoor. I knew them from Delhi itself. Anubhav Sinha was making ‘Abhi To Party Shuru Hui Hai’ at that time. I got associated with him and saw the film being made in front of me. From there, I understood the nuances of film writing. Then when I sat with Subhash Kapoor, he taught me commercial writing.
