• A happy movie?

Hopefully. I like to make happy movies.

• You’ve sometimes been charged with that, for being too joyful, happy, fantastic, unreal.

They call it mush, they call it bubblegum. I’ve been called various things. I’ve been called, you know, he just makes family films. As if that’s a bad thing. There’s been lot of criticism hurled at me. But I have been branded because I have made four films.

• Joint family films also. There’s a big group photo at the end of it.

Well, in the last one, I tried to break the whole family institution. It was my take on marriage and infidelity.

• Quite successfully.

Yes, it had an extreme reaction. There were people who hated it, and people who loved it, and people who felt uncomfortable watching it. But I felt it was a story I had to tell. So I was very happy to tell it in my way. But yes, I have been associated with one kind of film because all the films have started with the letter K, they have four words in it, they have Shah Rukh Khan in it. And invariably they have most often been shot out of the country. So they say Karan Johar makes NRI films. But I always say there is a heart and soul that I contribute to my cinema. I wish people would look at that rather than just the branding.

... contd.