Here’s a guy who’s born and bred in the U.K., and yet he turns out to be more Hindustani than the guy who was raised in Punjab. Here’s a guy who’s obviously flirtatious. And here was this film that completely turned this on its head, because here’s a guy who is buying beer in the first few minutes of the film. In films like Purab Aur Paschim or Des Pardes, it was the person from India who showed the Indian in the West what Indian values were. That’s a tough one to get because you are trying to make the characters a bit real, which was a new thing, which Aditya Chopra started.Īnupama Chopra: Traditionally, the West had been portrayed as a sort of decadent hotbed of sin in Hindi movies. Manish Malhotra (costume designer): There was a lot of glamour. Sharmistha Roy (art director): This wasn’t any part of our Indian genre, in terms of visuals. It was just one of those movies that sweep you away. And the critical reception was exactly the same. I remember so clearly at the premiere at New Excelsior -it’s a 1,000-seat hall. That is something that’s quite rare, actually.Īnupama Chopra (film critic and author of the 2002 book Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge: A Modern Classic): It was a blockbuster out of the gate. And all of us loved the film universally. It was an amazing feeling to know you made this. We all dressed up in our Bombay finery, and it was fabulous. Kajol (lead actress, Simran Singh): We saw the whole film, together, at the premiere. What started as a passion project for Chopra and a group of up-and-comers with a fresh perspective on what it meant to fall in love, went on to become a revered classic, a box-office heavyweight, the winner of a record-breaking (at the time) 10 Filmfare Awards-India’s Academy Award equivalent-and the film that changed the face of an industry.Īnd it all started when a boy met a girl.…įrom its plot to its premiere, DDLJ broke new ground in Bollywood. The flick, about Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) Raj and Simran and their star-crossed love that began and ended on a train, captured lightning in a bottle: It catapulted stars Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol to meteoric levels of fame, cemented the careers of music composers Jatin-Lalit and designer Manish Malhotra, and became a launching pad for future Bollywood mainstays like Karan Johar, who cut his teeth on DDLJ as one of the film’s assistant directors and supporting cast members. (In the midst of an historic 1,274-week run at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater, it was forced to temporarily close in March due to COVID-19.) Directed and written by then-24-year-old first-time filmmaker Aditya Chopra-under his father Yash Chopra’s mega-successful production banner Yash Raj Films-the Bollywood rom-com went on to become the longest-running Hindi film of all time. On October 20, 1995, DDLJ premiered in theaters and.never left. It’s a tale as old as, well, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.