Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Akshaye Khanna starrer ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ was rejected by distributors who said, ‘yeh film kabhi nahi chalegi’, says producer Ritesh Sidhwani

Dil Chahta Hai is considered a cult today in Hindi cinema. It’s one of those movies which started the trend of slice-of-life movies and at that point, it wasn’t a thing in Hindi cinema. While today the film enjoys the status of being eternal favourite for many, did you know that during the time of release, nobody thought that it would work. This was Farhan Akhtar’s directorial debut.

During a recent chat, producer Ritesh Sidhwani said, “When we started Dil Chahta Hai we were 27 or 28 at that point. I had no idea of what filmmaking was. I have never been to a shoot in my life. My friend here has written the script; I knew him, I knew what he could do, and that’s how Excel was born.”

At that point, multiplexes were just coming in. Hence, poeple thought ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ should have come some years later. However, Ritesh added, “But I think what it did was to bring an audience to cinemas which were not coming in. There were distributors who watched the movie. We very proudly showed the movie to the people who would not show films so we thought we are such big stars so let’s call them in and show them what we made and I think almost 6 of them saw the movie and left the film and said, ‘yeh film kabhi chalegi nahi.’ That’s how the Excel distributions with Anil Thadani started.”

‘Dil Chahta Hai’ also starred Preity Zinta, Sonali Kulkarni and Dimple Kapadia, apart from Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna.