Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback film Pathaan has been on an upward journey right from the time its advance booking commenced. The film, which also stars John Abraham and Deepika Padukone and is directed by Siddharth Anand, is an entertainment ride where heroic dialogues mouthed by the lead actors played a major role in its success.
EXCLUSIVE: In Pathaan, we wanted to have a party with dialogue baazi, says writer Abbas Tyrewala
It is Abbas Tyrewala who is responsible for the serious as well as witty lines in the film. Interestingly, he had also penned the dialogues for Siddharth Anand’s and Yash Raj Films’ last spy film War, which starred Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff in lead roles. In an exclusive chat with Bollywood Hungama, Tyrewala said that the brief he got for Pathaan was much different than what he had done in War.
“The brief was very clearly that, unlike War, where we were very sincere to the story and the characters, we wanted to have a bit more of a party with the dialogue baazi, humour and the laffazi. Pathaan and Shah Rukh was almost like a joint celebration, as against War which was very seriously trying to create two extremely strong characters and get two brilliant actors to play that. So you had to believe in the reality of Kabir and Khalid and not be thinking of Hrithik and Tiger.”
He elaborated, “In Pathaan, it was very clear that he (director) wanted the dialogues to be a lot more in-your-face, quotable and filmi. The brief was to make this a lot more filmi than War.”
This brief brought with it some challenges for Tyrewala. “Your real instinct would be to create a very serious moment,” he said. “So that part is a little challenging. Like what would actually a spy say in that moment and what would Shah Rukh playing that spy for a Bollywood film say in that moment.”
The stakes were very high for Pathaan. Apart from it being a film mounted on such a large scale, it was also the return of SRK after over four years as the main lead. But Tyrewala said that they didn’t think about the high pressure and the stakes.
“When we were making the film, we had no idea that there was going to be a pandemic and the lockdown and that when it releases Shah Rukh will not have had a film for four years and that all of Bollywood will be struggling on whether or not the audience wants to come back to theatres, and whether south Indian cinema has completely replaced Hindi cinema in terms of the taste of the viewer,” he said. “When we were writing, we were just writing a really exciting Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster Yash Raj film. So we didn’t have all that load while writing.”
But Tyrewala does feel that Siddharth, Aditya Chopra and others involved in the release would have felt anxious. “I am sure it must have been an extremely gruelling process for them. But for me, my process stopped two years ago when the final dialogue was written. After that, I was doing other things. I was in Goa (during the release of the film), attending my niece’s wedding. I have had a long time for Pathaan from being my film to go out of my system. My ownership on the film is when I am working for it,” he said.
The success of Pathaan is more special for Tyrewala also because it’s after a long time that people are quoting the dialogues of a film written by him; something that happened at the start of his career. “Not since my earlier films, have people remembered individual lines, enjoyed them and quoted them back to me. So in that sense, this is like a throwback to the time of Munna Bhai, Main Hoon Na where people remembered specific lines. It’s nice to enjoy that again,” he said.
Coming to the types of films Tyrewala has written the dialogues for throughout his career, it is a wide mixture of films of varied genres of films like Maqbool, Main Hoon Na, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S, Salaam Namaste, Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na and now Pathaan. He credits his surroundings and upbringing for keeping him knowledgeable about various facets of Hindi and English, which has helped him greatly in his career.
“I grew up in Byculla where there is a cosmopolitan street called Clare Road or Mirza Ghalib Marg, which is its technical name,” he said. “This is where the Bambaiya language was born. I grew up speaking that language. But I went to an ICSE school where I was a pretty good student, so I learnt proper Hindi as well. I loved reading, so I became decent at English. Then I went to St. Xaviers, which is extremely cosmopolitan where everyone speaks in English. And after that I was at O & M advertising.”
Abbas Tyrewala’s next in the pipeline is an espionage thriller show for Disney+ Hotstar, which he has written and created.
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