Director Aditya Dhar reveals how he convinced his leading man to deliver it
MUMBAI MIRROR (April 10, 2019)

The line, “How’s the josh?” has become synonymous with Vicky Kaushal’s true-life action drama, Uri: The Surgical Strike with even the prime minister quoting it. However, the film’s debutant director Aditya Dhar reveals that at one point during the shoot, he was about to change the line, following a suggestion from Vicky.

Recalling the incident, Aditya said, “We first used the line during the Myanmar sequence. Two minutes before the camera started rolling, Vicky came up to me and asked me to change the line because somewhere he thought the ‘feel’ wasn’t coming through. I tried explaining that to motivate their team, army commanders use such lines as pep talk and we should give it a try.”

He remembers that the first time their ‘hero’ spoke the line, all 30 members of our team had gooseflesh just hearing it. The 36-year-old director was chatting with veteran screenplay writer Robin Bhatt as part of an initiative by the Screenwriters Association (SWA).

Aditya went on to recount that as a little boy he would visit the Army Club in the capital with his friends and former officers would make the children line up and ask, “How’s the josh?” and they would reply, “High, sir.” Whoever was the loudest and the best, would get a chocolate. “Most of the time I used to win the chocolate,” the filmmaker smiled. The memory stayed with him and when scripting Uri, he wrote it as a dialogue for Vihaan’s character without realising it would become such a hit.

Given that the film has received so much appreciation from the audience and critics alike, has he been approached for a similar film? “Yes, Bollywood functions on what is trending. If a romcom is a hit, dozens of makers will start making one. Ditto for a war film,” he laughed, admitting that when he made Uri, war films were not a commercially successful genre. “But now everyone wants to make films on the Indian army and wars, so I will have to look for something different and start a new trend. When I start writing a story, it will be two-three years ahead of its time,” he added.

Bhatt responded to that saying a writer should think ahead because it takes a minimum of a year to make and release film so it’s important for the subject to be relevant till then and also have recall value long after. “Eventually we have only 10 stories to play with, the freshness in the narrative comes from the perspective and the expression of the storyteller,” explained the award winning screenplay writer of Baazigar, Aashiqui, Omkara to name a few.