Last month, Deepika Padukone reportedly decided to walk away from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s upcoming Telugu cop drama Spirit due to certain working demands, including a request for an ‘eight-hour workday’. Her request comes eight months after she became a mother to daughter Dua Padukone.
Now, filmmaker Siddharth P Malhotra, who directed Junaid Khan’s debut movie Maharaj last year, has weighed in on the matter. He claimed that eight-hour shifts aren’t new and his female actors have demanded them years ago. “We finished Hichki, the whole film, in 28 eight-hour shifts. Whether it was Rani (Mukerji), the kids, the cameramen or the spot boy, everyone finished in that time,” Malhotra told IANS.
Hichki, produced by Aditya Chopra’s Yash Raj Films, starred his wife Rani Mukerji in the lead role. It was the first film she did after giving birth to daughter Adira Chopra in December 2015. Rani had confessed that she began howling in the car on her first day to shoot the film back in 2016. She’d said, “For 14 months, I have been there in front of her face. So I kept asking myself, ‘Is it going to be worth it?’”
In the interview, Siddharth P Malhotra argued that every film and director have their own demands. “It’s been happening for years. When I’d shot with Kajol in 2010, she used to do eight-hour shifts. She made it very clear she’d either come for 10 am to 6 pm or 7 am to 2 pm or for an eight-hour shift at night. Rani also did the same. Deepika isn’t demanding anything new,” he said.
Siddharth P Malhotra with Kajol.
Malhotra worked with Kajol in his 2010 directorial debut We Are Family. Kajol also recently backed the eight-hour shift practice and told PTI, “I didn’t work for 20 or 30 hours. I was always very clear that we would work a certain amount only, and my mom (veteran actor Tanuja) also backed me up big time on it.”
Siddharth P Malhotra added that if Deepika Padukone has made these conditions clear right from the start, then the director shouldn’t work with her if it doesn’t suit them. He added, “If I need an actor and am confident I can finish the film within those working hours, I’d work with them even for six hours a day. This isn’t actor-specific. People are just gaining publicity in the name of Deepika Padukone. She’s asking for family time, what wrong is she demanding?”
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The director said if Vanga needs more time from his female actor, he can ask for more days. If not, he’s free to work with any other actor. Vanga has now signed his Animal actor Triptii Dimri as the lead opposite Prabhas in Spirit. Produced by Bhushan Kumar’s T-Series, Spirit is slated to release in cinemas next year.
