Did you know Aamir Khan had demanded Rs 8 crore for Rang De Basanti? Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra reveals why

New Delhi: Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra credited actor Aamir Khan for the timely completion of the film Rang De Basanti. In an excerpt from his biography The Stranger In The Mirror, he mentioned that Bollywood's Mr Perfectionist had asked the director to pay him Rs 8 crore if the completion of the film gets delayed. This clause motivated the director to not delay the making of the film as he couldn't imagine paying the whopping amount to the actor. 

In the excerpt published by The Quint, he revealed, "While signing on the dotted line, Aamir included a clause, which was the reason I ended up making the movie on time in the first place. Here’s an example: ‘If my fee is 4 crore and you don’t pay me on time, then you’ll have to pay me 8 crore for defaulting,’ he had said. I had never even seen 8 crores till then."

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra was in awe of Aamir's work ethic and wrote that he had no ego as he would sit through other actors' scenes as well. In fact, he fully credited the actor for the release of the film and mentioned that without him the script would've probably never materialised into a movie.

In the passage from the book, he also called Aamir a 'visionary' and said he had a deep understanding of the creative process of filming. Mehra wrote, "Aamir is a visionary and understands everything that is going wrong or right with the creative process. Sometimes, tough decisions like ‘let’s shoot for 10 more days’ became easy because Aamir backed the need to do it. Also, he had no ego about whose scene it was. If the scene belonged to the other boys, he would happily stay in the background because the film’s narrative was the Bible that could not be tampered with. Aamir’s cinematic understanding remains unparalleled in our industry. Without his nod, RDB would have been another dreamer’s script gathering the dust of apathy and inertia."

Rang De Basanti is a film that still lives on in the hearts of millions that watched it. It is a critically acclaimed film starring Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Alice Patten, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor. It was picked to be India's official entry for the Oscars and the Golden Globe Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

On the other hand, director Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's biography was released on July 27 and is co-written by marketer-author Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta and published by Rupa. While the foreword is penned by A R Rahman, Aamir Khan wrote the afterword