The director tells Bollywood Hungama he began writing the film before Sushant Singh Rajput's death but leaned on Rhea Chakraborty's media trial as the story mirrored real life, while also addressing the delay with Maddock Films.
Navjot Gulati wrote the first draft of Pooja Meri Jaan in April 2020, months before Sushant Singh Rajput's death turned into a national news cycle. By the time Rhea Chakraborty was facing what he calls a media trial, his script was already sitting on the page. In an exclusive conversation with Bollywood Hungama, the director says that overlap wasn't planned, but it didn't go unnoticed either.
"The witch hunt against her was wrong at every level," Gulati said, referring to the coverage that followed Chakraborty through 2020. He's careful to draw a line though: the case wasn't his trigger. It was something he watched happen in real time to a story he'd already started telling. "If something I had already written was literally playing out in real life, then obviously I was going to take notes from it," he said.
That's the backbone of Pooja Meri Jaan's first half, where Mrunal Thakur's character is hounded online and by television news. Huma Qureshi co-stars, with Vikram Singh Chauhan playing a character Gulati admits mirrors who he used to be. "I was Aniket at one point," he said, before adding that he's worked to understand his own blind spots since.
A female co-writer, and a reluctant star who said yes
Gulati wrote the script with Kanishka, a decision he says came from wanting a perspective he couldn't supply himself. "I'll never be able to understand what girls go through," he told Bollywood Hungama, crediting her for rounding out Pooja as a character rather than a plot device.
Thakur wasn't an obvious first pick. Gulati describes the casting process as a revolving door of names before Thakur read the script and pushed to play the part, partly because she'd lived through something similar herself. Once she was in the room, he says, the search ended. The film was shot across Delhi-NCR in 32 days.
The bigger story this year wasn't the shoot, it was the wait. Gulati had earlier voiced frustration that Maddock Films wasn't releasing the film, a delay that stretched on long enough that the footage, shot in 2022, still reads as current. Asked about his equation with the studio now, he kept it diplomatic. "They are the producers of the film and it exists because of them," he said, adding that the conversation has finally shifted from the delay to the film itself.
Gulati isn't done switching lanes. His next release, Badtameez Gill with Vaani Kapoor, Aparshakti Khurana and Paresh Rawal, is eyeing an early release next year, though cinemas aren't locked in yet. After that comes a dark comedy set inside a news channel, a film he says is still finding its cast. He's made it a rule, he says, never to repeat a genre twice. Three wedding films were enough to get him boxed in once already.
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