Harisree Yousuf has a script that never got made the way it was meant to. And now he's told the story of exactly why.

The writer, speaking to the Master Bin YouTube channel, said he wrote what would eventually become 'Hello Dubaikkaran' for Dileep, off the back of a friendship that goes back to 'Aa Maveli Kombath'. Once that film wrapped, he said, director Nadirshah handed him the reins for the next script, since it would be Nadirshah's own directorial debut. Yousuf and Nadirshah holed up in Munnar to write it, rewriting scene after scene because, in his words, even a small stumble on a first film is a big deal. The whole process took roughly a year, stretched further by a US trip Yousuf had committed to.

According to Yousuf, he pitched the idea to Dileep directly during a writing stint at Aluva Palace, and Dileep liked it enough on the spot to ask him to write it up. That became 'Hello Dubaikkaran'.

But the timing, Yousuf said, wasn't on his side. Dileep was riding high after 'Maya Mohini' at the time, with producers reportedly lining up to work with him, ready to swap in the next project the moment one fell through. And this one, Yousuf claims, had a problem Dileep couldn't get past: the lead was an ordinary man who'd lost everything and just wanted out to Dubai, a character with little room for the heroics Dileep apparently wanted more of.

Yousuf said conversations went back and forth, with things seemingly settling at points, only for the project to drift into limbo and eventually get dropped altogether. He said Nadirshah was disappointed too, and eventually decided against chasing Dileep further given how stretched the star's schedule was.

That opening, per Yousuf, is how a script from Bibin and Vishnu reached Nadirshah through Shajon instead. Dileep moved to that project and, Yousuf says, an advance of Rs 10,000 was paid to lock it in. Yousuf's own script, in his telling, ended up made without the star he'd written it for.

None of this has been confirmed by Dileep, Nadirshah or anyone connected to the alternate script Yousuf describes, and the account so far rests entirely on his own recollection in this one interview. What's clear is that 'Hello Dubaikkaran' did eventually get made, just not the way its writer first imagined it. Whether Dileep or Nadirshah respond to Yousuf's version of events is the open question now.