Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has finally broken his silence on the allegations that were levelled against him by actress Tanushree Dutta. The actress had accused the director of being rude to her during the shoot of their film, Chocolate.
Tanushree had also claimed that Agnihotri made her sit in front of the crew wearing short clothes despite it not being her turn to shoot.
Reacting to the allegations, Agnihotri told Shubhankar Mishra, "Yeh film industry ki aisi baat hai ki actors and actresses par bahut pressure hota hai to be successful. Jab aap successful nahi hote, toh aap kahi baar frustrate ho jaate hai ki you don't know what state of mind you are in. You can't stay in that sanity. You can't be rational."
He went on to say that in such cases, he prefers to "forgive" people and not pay heed to their comments. "People keep talking about you, but I don't take them seriously. I don't like to get engaged in such issues and let them do whatever they want to do," he stated.
In an earlier interview, Tanushree had claimed how Agnihotri had yelled at her when she had arrived late on the sets of Chocolate on just one day. "One day, when I arrived on set five minutes late, he yelled at me and called me unprofessional. Sometimes, I would come to the set when the lights weren’t even on and nothing was prepared, meaning the setup was completely unready. But on that particular day, I was exactly five minutes late, and he was on set just to see whether I had arrived or not," she had said.
She had also alleged, "Artists are supposed to rest in the van when they’re not shooting. Especially if you’ve given me clothes like these—short clothes and so on. Even when I sat in a robe, he would say, ‘No, there’s a shot coming up, so take it off.’ He would make me sit in those short clothes in front of the entire unit."
Chocolate: Deep Dark Secrets, which released in 2005, starred Irrfan Khan, Anil Kapoor, Emraan Hashmi, Sunil Shetty, and others in lead roles, along with Tanushree. The film was directed by Agnihotri.
