Imtiaz Ali is a celebrated director who has received praise for his remarkable work in Indian cinema delivering a unique style of movies. However, his 2017 film Jab Harry Met Sejal starring Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma was not well accepted by the audience. Although the film is a light-hearted feel-good drama it was considered as one of the biggest flops of SRK’s career. The filmmaker recently opened up on what went wrong with the film that received mixed to negative reviews.

In an interview with Mid-day, Imtiaz Ali revealed that he never imagined making a film with Shah Rukh Khan. He knew the actor was successful and he never thought of working with King Khan ever in real possibility. However, things materialized and they happened to come together for a project which released on the big screen as Jab Harry Met Sejal in 2017. 

Talking about why the film didn’t work at the box office, Imtiaz said, “I have always done films like how I have done television and theatre. The story comes first and then everything fits into it. Shah Rukh is the biggest star I worked with. But Shah Rukh is such an accessible person otherwise that he doesn’t give you the impression that ‘I am somebody’. He’s just a regular guy sitting over here like how you are talking.”

He went on to add, “But the fact is that he’s such a humongous star is not something I calculated or made provision for at all. I had written and directed the film that I would for anybody. But he’s Shah Rukh. That manifested in ways that I was not expecting maybe. The other thing is that I would have written the film differently. I would have had a flashback, I would have had scenes where Shah Rukh could be used to the best of his strength, both as an actor and as a star.”