Kabir Khan: I don’t want to slip under pressure and make wrong decisions

Come July 9 and Kabir Khan will pack his bags and head to Russia where the on-going FIFA World Cup will have reached its most interesting phase. The filmmaker will head out of India with his 15-year-old son, an ardent football lover, his daughter and wife, Mini Mathur to catch the semi-finals and the final match of the football world cup, which is currently being followed by people all over the globe.In the meanwhile, he’s busy giving finishing touches to the script of his next, based on India’s first cricket world cup win in 1983.
On June 25, India had achieved the impossible – in 1983, the country beat West Indies to clinch its first ever cricket world cup victory at Lord’s Cricket Stadium, England. Too much sport to handle? When we asked Kabir, he smiled and said, “I am going to Russia to watch the last set of matches with my kids. My son is a huge football fanatic. FIFA is the biggest sporting spectacle in the world. I think I just got lucky to have a chance to go for it. Our lives are so unpredictable, particularly in terms of our schedules and shoots. Thankfully, this world cup has happened at a time when I am not shooting. It’s fun…I am writing ’83 and I will be watching these high-adrenaline matches. It’s all just perfect. We just managed to make a plan. It was almost impossible to get the tickets, I just lucked out.”
Given that yesterday was the 35^th anniversary of India’s first world cup win, when we asked Kabir about his impending film, which he plans to roll out by the end of the year, he said, “You know youngsters imagine cricketers as these men with fancy cars and designer clothes. The squad that really won India its first win hadno money.They had very little on their hands to survive in London. The film will have many such interesting anecdotes. The story is not what happened on the field, but everything behind the scenes. That is where the narrative lies – it will be entertaining and engaging because we all pretty much know what happened on field. Over a period of time, we have collected so much material that it will just be a fun exercise putting it all together into one cohesive story. There are emotional stories and some really funny ones. This film will have so much to offer.”
Talking about his hero Ranveer Singh’s excitement, Kabir says that while his reel Kapil Dev was always excited about the project, his enthusiasm shot up to the skies when he met the 1983 legends at the launch of the film. “That is the day he got really charged about the project. He saw them in person, narrating incidents that happened around 1983. Everyone was hearing them with rapt attention. That got him hooked on to the project. I’ve been passing him almost all the research material so that he can relive those moments and be ready to face the camera when its time,” says the filmmaker.
Sports films are flavours of the season. Hockey in particular has been getting a lot of attention, thanks to Akshay Kumar’s ‘Gold’ and Diljit Dosanjh’s ‘Soorma’. Up next are biopics on Abhinav Bindra and Afshan Ashiq among others. Expectations from Kabir Khan’s 1983 will be extremely high, given that cricket is followed like a religion in India. “I have always believed in doing what I enjoy. I am going with the flow without letting any expectations and box office dictate my decisions and judgement of narrative. I don’t want to slip under those pressures and make wrong decisions,” Kabir sums up.