Sanjay Leela Bhansali on Deepika-Ranveer-Shahid's reaction to Padmaavat protests

Sanjay Leela Bhansali had a tough ride with Padmaavat before its release. However, the filmmaker has turned out to be victorious with the film garnering huge box office numbers. Some months ago, Bhansali had to face protests and physical threats while the film was in the making and also before the release of the film. Recalling the same, Sanjay Leela Bhansali said to a leading Indian daily, "Suddenly, one of the union members came running in and said, ‘People are coming!’ And before I could say, ‘what people?’ there was an attack. They started throwing things, breaking things. They beat two girl assistants up, one whack came on me, my specs flew off."

Adding further, Sanjay said, "This is extremely angering, it is extremely humiliating. And you sit back and wonder, could this have really happened? I have not seen any filmmaker in any part of the world go through this. Where is this coming from?".

Furthermore, he said, "For that year, I went through all this trauma, where on one side you are saving and preserving what you are creating, and not allowing your anger and bitterness, depression, disturbance — nothing can reflect on the shot you are taking, the scene you are constructing or the way you are giving your everything to this film."

Talking about how the situation was handled by Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor, Sanjay said, "I never allowed anybody to be rattled. They were angry, they were upset, but they never let that anger show on the screen. It was always simmering behind, in their thoughts, in their minds. But they all gave wonderful performances. Any artist who is painting in a complete sense of distress or angst — that painting is something else. It goes to another zone, because energies flowing from the body out of anger for injustice, circumstances, chaos, are of another level."

However, speaking about Padmaavat, he said, "Because this was a dream, right from Nandini running on a bridge alone in a red sari in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, to 16,000 women running in red towards fire — for me there were so many images that had now magnified, or become bigger, or had its own connotation, it had its own language... so all that was coming to my mind as I was seeing, vis-à-vis my work, motifs that sometimes were getting repeated from my earlier work to now, or the new ones I was very fascinated by and said (clicks fingers), how the hell did I get that one? When did that come? And there were a lot of improvisations that I was doing through the film. It was all written, but it was not really storyboarded, it was not framed and formed and choked to with the paper, it was left, I would go there and react and respond and you do this and let’s do this and let’s do that, change that dialogue — I was living it at that moment."