Apurva Asrani slams Kangana over Manikarnika, says star hi-jacking film is 'hara-kiri'

By Vandana Srivastawa

on September 03, 2018

Kangana Ranaut’s old foe screenwriter Apurva Asrani took a sly dig at her in a cryptic tweet on Saturday for “hijacking a film” and described it as the “worst form of hara-kiri”. Apurva was shrewd enough to not take any name in his tweet but alluded to the controversy surrounding the historical period drama Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi where Kangana has taken over the reins of the film for some patchwork scenes from the director Krish Jagarlamudi and the exit of Sonu Sood from the film.

Apurva and Kangana had an altercation last year during Hansal Mehta’s film Simran. He had alleged that Kangana who has been credited as additional dialogue and story writer in the film had tried to discredit his work in public by saying that she developed the story with Mehta from a one-line script. Kangana dismissed the claims. However, looks like now Apurva is trying to once again wash his dirty linen in public and unearth past issues.

https://twitter.com/Apurvasrani/status/1035916545250217986

The producers of the film have already gone on record and issued a statement clarifying that Kangana has stepped in only to do some patchwork edits as director Krish has moved on to the NTR biopic and do not have dates for the reshoot. However, the controversy is not dying down and Kangana has been at the receiving end. The exit of Sonu also became a big issue as the actress alleged that he wasn’t comfortable following the lead of a woman, whereas Sonu contradicted and said, “The gender of the director is not the issue, competence is.”

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi has been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. The film is slated for January 25, 2019, release and the producers of the film have been trying to stick to the schedule. Apparently, the writers and the producers of the film saw the draft of Manikarnika and were not happy with it, but by that time director Krish had moved on the NTR project and had no dates for the patchwork scenes, so the producers roped in Kangana to direct the scenes as she had done the most amount of research on the film. Sonu’s character will be played by Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub now.