New Delhi, Dec 25: Karan Johar has remade the 1990 action-drama ‘Agneepath' with Hrithik Roshan in the lead, but the filmmaker says he and director Karan Malhotra never attempted to recreate the magic of the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer original.
The 39-year-old filmmaker, whose father Yash Johar had produced the earlier film, says they wanted to take the basic core of ‘Agneepath' and narrate it an altogether different manner because it was “virtually impossible” to emulate something as powerful as Vijay Dinanath Chauhan.
“How can anyone emulate Amitabh Bachchan? Nobody should do that and it is to Karan Malhotra's intelligence and Hrithik's conviction that they understood it really well and approached the film and the characters in their own way,” Johar told PTI.
“What we have done in our version is to pay homage to the yesteryear ‘Agneepath' with a great amount of reverence for the genius of Mukul S Anand and Amitabh Bachchan,” he added.
As per Johar, the core idea behind that was to stay away from the norms because he didn't want to be accused of just repeating the success formula.
“If we had made Vijay Dinanath Chauhan as just the same character that has been played before, we would have been asked why we played safe. It only made sense for us to worship what had been accomplished instead of trying to impersonate it. It would have been impossible for any actor to get the kind of swagger, style and baritone as Amitabh Bachchan had brought to fore in ‘Agneepath'.”
