Kisi Ka Bhai’s Farhad Samji Has no Time for Intellectuals

As someone who last saw Salman Khan in a theatre in 2018 (as a part of a promotional song during the end credits of a film), the opportunity to interview the director of Khan’s latest film should’ve been an easy conversation. 

FC: “Would you like to interview Farhad Samji, director of Kisi Ka Bhai, Kisi Ki Jaan?”

Me: “No.” 

I’ve all but given up on Khan bringing about the next renaissance in Hindi cinema. Of course, not all films need to be responsible to inspire evolution – some just want to ‘entertain’ – so maybe I’m my own obstacle to becoming a true Bhai-sexual. Yet in a time when discussions have been reduced to shouting matches and people only seem to have venom for those they see as ‘the other side’, I saw this as my chance to sit down and engage outside my echo chamber. 

Which explains my 36-minute phone call with director Farhad Samji, who patiently listened to the questions about my grouse with his kind of commercial cinema. He dodged some; hid behind vague responses like “script ki demand” and “character ki demand” for a few; and also shared some fine anecdotes (which you only find in Bombay film-dom) about his 23-year run in Bollywood.

Raised in Bandra, Samji’s family moved to Bengaluru where they ran a family restaurant. “Over there I used to write songs for my friends and family. They obviously told me that I write well, but I never took it seriously,” said the writer-director. At age 23, the same year he got married, Samji was goaded by his father to move back to “try his luck in Bollywood”. With a newly-wed wife and a bank of 400 songs, Samji moved to Mumbai, going from studio to studio, trying to shop his lyrics. 

After about 18 months, Samji landed in a room where Salman Khan gave him five minutes. He was on the sets of Har Dil Jo Pyaar Karega (2000), when Khan told him, “If it doesn’t work for me, I’ll quietly get up and leave. Don’t get offended.” Performing his songs for Khan was a big deal for Samji and soon enough, according to Samji, “mahaul jam gaya (the mood was set)”. Khan pulled in his co-stars Satish Shah and Paresh Rawal and they sang songs all day. “Sajid Nadiadwala was sad because that meant ki uss din ka pack-up ho gaya (that day was a goner),” remembered Samji. Khan then introduced Samji to David Dhawan and Sanjay Dutt, both of whom would go on to work with Samji (and his brother Sajid since they worked as a duo at the time) on Hum Kisi Se Kam Nahi (2003) and Chor Machaaye Shor (2003) respectively.

What began with the lyrics for the odd song has gone on to become a storied career with many record-breaking franchises. Samji has worked on the dialogues for 12 Rohit Shetty films, including Singham (2011) and Simmba (2018). He’s the director and co-writer of two of the four Housefull films. Does writing a line like “Aata majhi satakli” ever sound silly in the writing room? How does he gauge which of these will get an applause at Bandra’s single-screen bastion, G7? Samji says it’s not just the conviction in his writing that is a primary ingredient, but also his ability to enact these scenes in front of his actors. “I learned this from Rajkumar Santoshi and Neeraj Vora – they were masters of narrating to actors,” he said, adding that he prefers narrations to mailing his scripts.

Starting with writing the lyrics of films in the early 2000s, Samji has come a long way to directing a tentpole like Kisi Ka Bhai, Kisi Ki Jaan. The films he’s directed –  most recently Bachchan Pandey (2022) – are the kind of derivative commercial films that belittle their audience. More often than not, they also end up repurposing stale, regressive tropes, and not in a fun way. When I ask Samji about whether he and his counterparts get unfairly slotted as the folks behind films that are “greedy” and “lazy”, he said, “The perfect slap to all these questions is RRR (2022). Ram Charan fighting 800 people and NTR fighting a tiger in their respective intro scenes – what can be more commercial than this?” But RRR won widespread critical acclaim from Indian as well as foreign critics, and not all commercial films can claim to be as well put-together as RRR. “Sure, you could say that,” agreed Samji, “but then neither are all your ‘message films’ critically acclaimed.” Fair enough.

The kind of commercial films that Samji is associated with also invariably gives female actors the short end of the stick. The whole point of their existence in these stories has either to do with their beauty and/or so that they can be rescued at some point by the film’s invariably alpha-male hero. Samji laughed off this criticism by saying no one forced him to make these kinds of films, going on to recollect a line director David Dhawan supposedly told him: “Chalti gaadi ka bonnet kabhi mat kholna (Never open the bonnet of a moving car).” Samji says he genuinely feels privileged to be making films that might be looked down upon by the so-called intellectuals.  “I have my own characters, my interval point, my climax point. I can’t try a bit of this and a bit of that and land nowhere,” he said. “I have to write what the character and script demands.” It also helps that Samji has an enviable track record at the box office as a writer and director. His Housefull 4 (2019) grossed close to Rs 300 crore.

It’s not hard to imagine Samji and most of his collaborators (including Khan, who is also the producer of Kisi Ka Bhai…) becoming imprisoned by his own success. They’re hardly the only ones faced with this problem, but at this point, it’s difficult to tell the sequences of one Salman Khan film from another. If an Indian commercial film is often described as a thali, a Salman Khan film feels like a hastily put together plate of leftovers, pushing the boundaries of good taste and logic. In this latest one, they've got a song featuring lungi because some ancillary characters seem to belong to “Southern India”. The song features Salman Khan, Venkatesh, Pooja Hegde, Instagram sensation Palak Tiwari and ex-Bigg Boss contestant Shehnaaz Gill. Also, Ram Charan will make a special appearance. Samji denies these details are not an attempt to ride the current wave of popularity for Telugu mainstream cinema, but it’s hard to not be cynical about a Telugu song being incorporated into a Salman Khan film in a post-Naatu Naatu universe. He insisted the song was “script ki demand”. 

When I ask Samji what the main ingredient is to make a successful Salman Khan film, his response is immediate: “Salman Khan.” Such deity worship is unnecessary and depressingly commonplace in the Hindi film industry. I asked him if he has any ideas that have been regarded as commercially not feasible. Samji cleared his throat through most of the answer. “It’s not like I wait to have an entire idea,” he said. “I keep having these tiny ideas that we incorporate into romantic songs or it could be a particular way of doing an action scene.” 

Some time later, Samji admitted to having a couple of “offbeat” ideas, which he will probably get to at some point in the future. Could he give me a hint about what these could possibly be? Samji demurred, leaving me wondering what it’s like to spend more than half of one’s life chasing success, only for it to end up being a promo for Kisi Ka Bhai, Kisi Ki Jaan.