Friendship First

Ahead of the film's release, the team of Kai Po Che! shares the stories of its making and the journey so far

The latest Screen Preview had a bunch of actors, who were high on energy and camaraderie. Accompanied by director Abhishek Kapoor and producer of the film and CEO, UTV Motion Pictures, Siddharth Roy Kapur, actors Sushant Singh Rajput, Rajkumar Yadav and Amit Sadh were in Express Towers, Mumbai, on Saturday to talk about their upcoming film Kai Po Che!, which releases on February 22. This set the stage for a free-wheeling conversation, peppered with candid confessions and insights.

Book and the film

Kai Po Che! is likely to escape the usual set of problems that accompany most book-to-screen adaptations. Its director, Abhishek Kapoor, found Chetan Bhagat's novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life Bollywood-friendly, even though he went through the initial confusion over picking one overarching theme for the film. "I decided to focus on friendship, though there were other threads such as politics and cricket. There are quite a few things from the book that we had to do away with," he said.

While he had to work on filling several gaps, it also gave him the scope to add depth to the characters and write a script that could stand on its own. The fact that the film's producers hadn't read the book before the script helped. "Even when we went back to the script after reading the book, we were happy with it because of the way Abhishek wrote it," said Siddharth.

Young Guns

Like his last film, Rock On!!, in Kai Po Che! too, Abhishek has shown faith in new talent, casting lesser-known actor Rajkumar Yadav or television

stars such as Sushant Singh Rajput and Amit Sadh as his protagonists. According to the director — who looks to tap into the nervous energy of new actors — there is no better place to source fresh talent than television and theatre. "We can't get a rank newcomer from the street for a fresh face. He or she has to come with certain professionalism and training that can only come from television and theatre," he says. "These television actors are so trained that they can remember five-six pages of dialogues at one go," adds Abhishek.

... contd.

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