Karan Johar Tells Us 6 Things You Didn’t Know About Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

To celebrate the film turning 20 this year, director Karan Johar tells us his favourite bits of trivia from the shoot

1. There's no reason for that Faridabad signboard to be there

"If you zoom into a signage in the sequence pre-interval, it's meant to be in Faridabad. Why? Do not ask me. We didn't go to Faridabad, we went to Mauritius to shoot this college. In Mauritius, clearly I didn't think even that was good enough. So one particular scene (the famous bench scene where Shah Rukh and Rani console Kajol) was not shot in Mauritius, certainly not in Faridabad, but this is in Scotland. A college meant to be in Faridabad has travelled everywhere but Faridabad."
2. Why Kajol's outfit was so garish

"This is Kajol, who looks like a fruitcake. We wanted to make her look over the top and this was our version of over the top. I've seen many girls dress like this normally today, but this was considered funny in the '90s."

3. Cameos that went unnoticed

"The sequence begins with my mother walking down the stairs. She was in a green and blue salwaar kameez. She looked like she was working for Air India for some reason on that day. If you carefully see the crowd of "students", Manish Malhotra and Farah Khan are two of the students sitting on the stairs. Manish has the strangest haircut that I've ever seen him in."

4. SRK can't laugh on screen

"I have to give you a little bit of trivia on Shah Rukh Khan. Shah Rukh Khan is possibly the finest actor I have ever worked with and is considered one of our leading movie stars and best actors. But ask him to laugh in a scene, he can't do it. He finds it very difficult to laugh naturally on scene. So we had many takes of just trying to make Shah Rukh laugh. It gets so exhausting that he laughs just out of exhaustion. Here he is banging the wall out of frustration because he just doesn't know how to laugh with complete conviction."

5. The shot of SRK holding Rani's hand sparked a two-hour-long debate

"I have to tell you, onscreen and on paper, it was just considered a scene where Shah Rukh comes and pacifies Kajol and then Rani comes in as well, and then all three of them have a kind of a group hug situation and we move on. I got some kind of a weird thought at that time – like what if he hugs Kajol and Rani wants to leave them for a moment and walk away, and he holds her hand. Now, we debated this for over two hours and we were losing light and Santosh Sivan (DoP) was losing his perspective. The big debate was – is Shah Rukh coming across as too evil? I think we overthought it because no one else gave it so much thought when the scene was finally played out. But I remember debating this for 2 hours because my father kept looking at his watch because we were paying by the hour for this location. Those were the days we were a much poorer film economy. Shooting abroad was a huge deal."

6. Debates over having too much pink on screen

"There was a major breakdown that Manish Malhotra and I had because they were both in shades of pink and I wanted contrast. It was only my father who walked in and said, "I don't care what colour they are wearing, just shoot."

Shahrukh Khan

Karan Johar

Kajol

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

Karan Johar Tells Us 6 Things You Didn’t Know About Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

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