Writer Abbas Tyrewala on Pathaan: 'I signed up for someone’s vision and helped Aditya Chopra and Siddharth Anand optimise, maximise and achieve that'

Screenplay and dialogue writer of Pathaan, Shridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala in an exclusive conversation with The Free Press Journal.

Abbas Tyrewala, who has written the dialogues of the blockbuster Pathaan, feels that while writing the dialogues of the film, he didn’t take any pressure to resonate the stardom of Shah Rukh Khan. “Being a professional technician in the film, I didn’t carry that kind of baggage as a responsibility. I signed up for someone’s vision and helped Adi (Aditya Chopra) and Sid (Siddharth Anand) optimise, maximise and achieve that

vision. If I would be taking the pressure, I wouldn’t be doing justice to craft and end up doing things less constructive,” he explains.

“Although you know it’s a Shah Rukh Khan film and you have to write memorable lines but while writing them down, nothing of that sort of happens. It was an interesting process... Siddharth follows a very different process with the writers, both screenplay and dialogues. I came into the picture when the whole screenplay was written. In Siddharth’s films, I don’t really interact with anyone except with him and of course Adi Chopra. However, Sid had directed Bang Bang! and War earlier, I didn’t take any of those factors into consideration to take the action legacy forward with Pathaan,” he adds. 

Abbas, who earlier wrote and helmed films like Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Jhoota Hi Sahi, and Pathaan is certainly poles apart in terms of writing. When asked about his challenges on that front, he reveals, “Very early in my career, I wrote a film called Maqbool, it had nothing to do with joy or beauty of youth, it is probably the darker film you’ll ever see. Around the same time, I was writing Main Hoon Naa for Farah Khan, which was very campy and in a fun space. It always comes with the vision of filmmakers. Imagine, Rajkumar Hirani took Munna Bhai MBBS out of me. I never outguess my directors, I always take them at face value.”

SRK headlined Pathaan but John Abraham as Jim and Deepika Padukone as Rubina also had their share of the pie in the film. “I realised at an elementary level, that if I write cardboard characters, the audience won’t get a third-dimensional experience. The more life you give to your characters, the more memorable they would be,” he concludes.