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Vishal Punjabi, aka The Wedding Filmer, spoke about his long association with Shah Rukh Khan. He said that he first became acquainted with SRK back in the 1990s, when the superstar hired him to create his personal website. He later joined Shah Rukh’s Red Chillies Entertainment, and was also set to direct him in a film co-starring Priyanka Chopra. But his career was derailed when he was deported from India for working on an expired visa. In an interview, Vishal said that Shah Rukh helped him reverse the deportation, and also offered him a job on the film Ra.One. But Vishal decided to start something of his own, and that’s how The Wedding Filmer began.
Appearing on Shivani Pau’s podcast, Vishal recalled, “I used to work with Shah Rukh as a creative director. That was my day job for a decade.” Asked how he got the gig, Vishal explained, “I was in London, studying, fed up of the cold. I really wanted to move to India. I worked on a website that exploded; it won a lot of design awards. Shah Rukh, at that point, was looking for a web designer. This was around 1999, early 2000s, when there was a dot com boom. He wanted to start this Bollywood portal where you could stream music and watch his films; specialised content created by him for his fans around the world.”
Vishal said that he wrote an application, and got the job. “I even got to speak to him. At first I thought it was a hoax. But I landed there, and three months later, the company shut down because the guy who was funding it got arrested and the dot com thing crashed. I thought I’d have to go back. But he liked me, because I was good at what I used to do. He was making Asoka, and he said, ‘Don’t go back, I’ll move you to Red Chillies, and you come and make this movie with us.’ And then I kind of wiggled my way into Bollywood,” he said.
But because Vishal was working on a Ghanaian passport and hadn’t bothered to renew his visa, he was deported from India and banned from returning for four years. A couple of years later, however, Shah Rukh was able to use his connections to get the deportation reversed. Vishal continued, “Shah Rukh was working on this movie called Ra.One, he was like, ‘Come work on Ra.One’. But that movie had 36 cameras, and I didn’t really like the script. I wasn’t sure about the people who were working on it… It’s two years of your life, so I decided not to. I decided to start this company instead.”
Vishal has now created wedding videos for celebrity couples such as Anushka Sharma-Virat Kohli, and Deepika Padukone-Ranveer Singh, among many others. He said that the most that he has ever quoted for a video is around Rs 3 crore, and that he often turns down gigs if he doesn’t gel with the couple, or if he’s made prior commitments.
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