Kangana Ranaut slams Apurva Asrani for allegations against her over ‘Simran’ credits

Ever since the first teaser of Kangana Ranaut-starrer ‘Simran’ was released, the actress has been in a controversy as the writer of the movie, Apurva Asrani has placed allegations against her and director Hansal Mehta for stealing his writing credit and giving Kangana the first preference as a writer in the movie poster. Producer Shailesh Singh supported Kangana, and director Hansal Mehta also took to Twitter to clarify the incident and bashed the writer’s intentions. Now, actress Kangana Ranaut has opened up on the entire incident.

She opened up on the same in an interview with Huffington Post, Kangana said, “Apurva’s story was this dark thriller about a drug-addict who goes into a life of crime. It also had a lot of flavour of ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ with share market jargon thrown in. I made it very clear that if we’re making a film with a budget of Rs 30 crore, we need to make at least Rs 60 crore to even break-even. With the kind of script we had, that wouldn’t be possible as it’d appeal to very limited people. Hansal then told me that I was free to talk to Apurva and get the script tweaked to make it more accessible. Now let’s make something very clear: actors are very money-oriented. Some actors even take money to cut ribbons at a store. I’m not dying to lend my creative ideas and writing ideas when I’m being paid to act. Actors always want to be blown away by a dazzling script. When that’s not the case, you need to fix it. When I started collaborating with Apurva, I realised this isn’t a writer who matches my expectations. And when I enquired about his previous writing work, I realised he hadn’t done them.” (Also Read: Apurva Asrani: Was arm twisted to give Kangana Ranaut co-writer credit for ‘Simran’)

She further spoke about her involvement in the scripting, “Yes, there were sessions but those were mostly me expressing my disappointment with the writing. Nobody can take away the fact that if Simran today is a story of a divorced woman, it’s entirely introduced by me. If the film has feminist undercurrents, I included that. The father-daughter track, the lover’s track in the film—these are subplots that I added. Even Apurva cannot take away from that… Later, Hansal did a draft of his own and I could sense that he was under enormous pressure. He wanted to break away from Apurva but he couldn’t. We did three drafts together and I still wasn’t satisfied. I couldn’t sense a spark. Finally, Hansal and I agreed that we’ll fine tune this in the US (they reached there about a fortnight in advance) and I’ll write the dialogues on sets.”

Prajakta Ajgaonkar

Passionate about writing, and a Bollywood lover, she is all that is sweet and endearing! She desires to put her best foot forward in everything that she does and loves to help anyone who’s in need.