While Kangana Ranaut is being widely appreciated for her performance, Hansal Mehta’s Simran has been panned by critics and the film also failed to create a wave at the ticket windows. Four days after the controversial film hit theatres, its director has deleted his Twitter account.
Simran has earned a total of Rs 10.65 crore over the weekend.
The pre-release buzz around Simran was limited to Kangana’s explosive interviews about her personal life and exposes about Bollywood. When asked why Simran was not being talked about during promotions, the director said, “I think connecting her (Kangana’s) personal issues to a film and its publicity will be trivializing her personal issues and her courage with which she is answering all these tough questions,” he said, insisting that Kangana is doing nothing but answering questions posed to her by the media.
“Film publicity nowadays follow templates and we did not want to do that. She (Kangana) is only answering the tough questions being posed to her, and she is answering them without flinching. We are quite happy with the good response that we have received on the trailer and songs of Simran. We did not want to anything else, did not want to follow the usual publicity template,” he added.
Simran was also mired in controversies ever since the first poster was revealed. Writer-editor Apurva Asrani and Kangana had a public dispute over the writing credits for the film. While Kangana claimed to have literally rewritten the entire script, Asrani said valuable inputs from Kangana had been incorporated in the final draft, just like in any other film. Later, Asrani even said he had no idea about what the final product (Simran) looked like.
Speaking about Asrani’s allegations, Kangana had said, “First of all I want to make it clear that there are no dues pending. Somehow people make it look like Apurva has not be given his credit, that is not true. We made the contract exactly the way he wanted it to be. In fact, Apurva is the one who suggested me to take additional credit for dialogue writing. So we made the contract that way.”
Asrani had also alleged that Hansal was missing from the sets of Simran during the shoot. Apurva said that Kangana messaged him and said, “I am done with a clueless and a spineless director (Hansal). I am done with his selfish team. Skilled director left the film sighting gender bias issues, according to him he can’t handle a woman calling the shots, he was always told he’ll have to collaborate, on the other hand he encouraged me calling himself a feminist, then what happened to a feminist director?”
