Laal Singh Chaddha: How Aamir Khan adapted Forrest Gump to Bollywood

Bollywood star Aamir Khan waited for a decade to secure the rights from the 1994 Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump.

It was only in 2018 that he began work on Laal Singh Chaddha, a formal adaptation of the Ben Hanks classic, which opens in theatres on Thursday.

Khan teamed up along with debutant screenwriter Atul Kulkarni and movie director Advait Chandan to bring the film to the theatres. He wanted to make it a “respectful homage to the original and take it in an fascinating new direction”, according to the film’s production notes.

During the first software reading, the makers setup some chairs in a room trying to recreate the atmosphere of the train.

“We put people in their places and began reading. Khan acquired internalised Laal so much that it immediately turned out so organically. He or she was Laal immediately, ” says Chandan. “Khan lived with this character for about 10 years”.

India has adapted a number of films from The show biz industry, Korean or European movies across different languages. But Laal Singh Chaddha is special: filmmaker Karan Johar said on his well-known show that the remake of “such an iconic Hollywood movie has never happened before” in Bollywood.

Laal Singh Chaddha is like a “cover song of a really loved classic”, states Chandan. Although Gump is a quintessentially American film, he says this is a “universal story, which we could bring an Indian flavour in order to. ”

Like Gump, the good-hearted simpleton, who else travels through milestones in US background – the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal – Chaddha’s life takes your pet through the cultural plus political turnpikes associated with 20th-Century India.

He is witness in order to epochal events including India’s first cricket World Cup earn and the armed turmoil with Pakistan in Kargil.

The particular film, keeping with Bollywood’s love for musicals, is loaded with tunes. “If a film does not take songs, it does not really feel Indian to me, inch says Chandan. “The songs in the film reflect Laal’s emotions evoking the same emotional response in the target audience. ”

The movie has tweaked the original Forrest Gump tale and brought in elements which make it Indian native, the producers say.

Gump’s well-known metaphor, “life is similar to a box associated with chocolates. You never know what you gonna get” is replaced along with golgappa, India’s popular street food, the crisp-fried round ball filled with chickpeas and potatoes and dunked in sweet plus spicy water.

In Gump, Forrest sits on the along with at a bus quit for most of the time and tells the story associated with his life in order to strangers. In Laal Singh Chaddha, the director has swapped the bus end for a train : Laal Singh informs his story to gathering passengers on the train journey.

“The railways are a big part of our lives. These are long journeys, sometimes 24 hours, and you find yourself making friends with people. You share food and drinking water, and you find connections with them. I remember since a child I’d make friends upon trains and then I’d write to them on their birthdays, ” states Chandan.

Within Forrest Gump, the smoothness of Jenny — Gump’s best friend who he later marries – had evoked a lot of conversations more than her abused child years and her incapability to respond to Gump’s affections.

Khan’s adaptation appears to have prevented the moral ambiguity and portrayed Cara (played by Kareena Kapoor Khan) like a woman with a bothered childhood and unfulfilled ambitions of becoming a Bollywood star.

Like Jenny, “Rupa’s journey is the exact same, but we discovered an Indian version of it”, states Chandan.

Chaddha can also be an exploration of Indian, say the makers. Such as Gump, Laal Singh is shown working across the country: the film was shot within over a hundred different locations – most of them not so well-known, as an “epic” nature recreation area in the southern state of Kerala.

Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a physically demanding role to get Khan, 58.

The makers say Khan prepared himself running through different parcours, from busy metropolitan areas to mountains. “Thank god he’s the fit guy!, inch says Chandan.

Khan suffered a leg injury during the producing of the film that will had him limping in certain shots when he was running, based on the producers. “He had been injured, but he kept going. It was a taxing film for him, ” says Chandran.

Whenever Forrest Gump was initially released some experts were sceptical. The newest York Times discovered the film “a loose string of vignettes, presented at an unemphatic, page-flipping speed… and establishing Forrest as an accidental symbol of his times”. Defying the sceptics, Forrest Gump grew to become one of the top grossing films in the US plus won six Oscars in 1994.

Khan will be hoping Laal Singh Chaddha will reprise similar success with audiences in India.

“The hope is that to get someone who hasn’t watched Forrest Gump, might love experiencing this unique form of storytelling for the first time. And for someone who has noticed Forrest Gump, the can enjoy the new taste this has and the twists and turns coming from taken, plus the impresses we’ve thrown in, inch says Chandan.

Bollywood’s superstar movies are yet to make a mark at the package office this year. The huge success of films in the southern part of Indian languages with better scripts and slicker visuals has been a speaking point among critics and moviemakers.

Will certainly Laal Singh Chaddha help return Bollywood to box office glory? The jury is out on that one.

Pictures courtesy of Aamir Khan Productions, Viacom18 Companies and Paramount Pictures

Sudha G Tilak is a Delhi-based independent journalist