Haider

Haider (2014)

हैदर

A young man returns to Kashmir after his father's disappearance to confront his uncle - the man he suspects to have a role in his father's fate.

Date of release
2014-10-02
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (268)
Runtime
2h 30m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Vishal Bhardwaj

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Hamlet

Haider is a 2014 Indian Hindi-language political action thriller film directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, who co-produced it with Siddharth Roy Kapur, and written by Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer. It stars Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Kay Kay Menon, Shraddha Kapoor and Irrfan Khan.

Production

Vishal Bhardwaj first ought to direct romantic film 2 States and ask Shah Rukh Khan to play to role. However, Khan rejected it for playing back to back romantic films, and wanted a darker role, so he asked Bhardwaj to cast him in Haider, but Bhardwaj rejected back. Initially, Vishal Bhardwaj and Shahid Kapoor were in talks of making a sequel to their previous collaboration, the action drama Kaminey (2009).

Bhardwaj was initially developing the play as a contemporary espionage thriller with author Stephen Alter. They wrote a 30-page synopsis that was sent to Gulzar. Though Gulzar liked the synopsis, he enquired Bhardwaj of the missing tragedy of Hamlet in the penned thriller. The synopsis had incomplete details about the life, authenticity and the Official Secrets Act of RAW agents.

Bhardwaj and Peer agonised a lot over the soliloquies required. There were sections of the To be, or not to be speech that was translated directly in Hindi. Due to constraints of time they had to omit the Apparel maketh a man soliloquy though. They retained and translated the section where Hamlet meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and speaks about Denmark being in prison.

"It was the political turmoil and the 25 years of tragedy of Kashmir that compelled me. Our way of looking at Kashmir has either been cosmetic – only for shooting songs – or rhetoric, where we show a man in a phiran, holding a Kalashnikov. Haider is the first film where we see Kashmir from the inside. I don't think we have made a mainstream film about the issue."

As per the story of Hamlet, an Oedipus complex exists that draws Hamlet (played by Shahid Kapoor) towards his mother Gertrude (played by Tabu) that could have been interpreted both at a physical and psychological level, however, Bhardwaj kept this reference subtle as the target audience was predominantly Indian and called it 'one of the aspects in this mother-son relationship.' In his previous outing of Othello's adaptation, Omkara (2006), he rem…

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