Spoke to Vishal Bhardwaj about my take on Kandahar hijacking, he approved of it: Anubhav Sinha

Mumbai: Anubhav Sinha says he got to know about Vishal Bhardwaj's shelved project on Kandahar hijacking only after he boarded IC 814 The Kandahar Hijack.

The Netflix series, which is based on the 1999 hijack of an Indian aircraft by five terrorists on December 24, 1999, 40 minutes after it took off from Kathmandu, is slated to release on August 29. Bhardwaj last year revealed that his project on Kandahar hijacking was dropped by Prime Video following the political controversy over Tandav.

Asked whether he spoke to Bhardwaj, Sinha said he met with the Haider filmmaker and discussed his version at length.

"After I took on this, I got to know about Vishal’s (project). He is a friend; we meet often and share our love for cinema. We spoke and I told him the lens I was using, and he approved of it and he really liked it.

"He (Vishal) reads all my scripts, I read most of his scripts before they are made, so we share our work with each other. In this case, it was not fair on me to encroach upon things he had created. Also, it would colour my lens," Sinha told PTI during a media discussion here.

Netflix's Monika Shergill said they met captain Devi Sharan in 2019 and had no clue that someone was working on the same story. The Netflix series is adapted from the book Flight Into Fear by Sharan and Srinjoy Chowdhury.

"There was a common passion to tell the story and to do it in the most defining (manner). Every project has to have right people come together and Anubhav was a large missing piece of that project," Shergill, Vice President - Content, Netflix India, said.

According to Shergill, while she was keen to have Sinha on board, the director of Mulk and Thappad was reluctant to commit to a series.

"In 2021 when I called him, he was in Istanbul and I was in Ooty, it was 11:00pm and I said to him, ‘I’ve asked you before and I’m very clear how this should be made and you should be the person making it’. He said, ‘I’ve too many films lined up and right now I’m not thinking of a series’.

"He said, ‘Abhi waqt nahi hai and we will work together on a series’. A year-and-half later, I called him and said, ‘I'm asking you one last time, you should not miss out on this subject'. He said, ‘I’m in Istanbul and it's peak evening’. We spoke and kind of agreed." Shergill said while the facts about the hijack are in the public, their story is an attempt to retell the story of the event "from a human lens".

"IC 814 The Kandahar Hijack" features Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Arvind Swamy, Dia Mirza and Patralekhaa among others.