Vishal Bhardwaj reveals OTT platform dropped his Kandahar hijacking project after Tandav- here's why

Vishal Bhardwaj is known for directing films that either carry a strong message or revolve around a real-life event. Before starting the shoot of a film, the director does extensive research, maybe why most of his directorial films are major hit. But, did you know one of his projects on the Kandahar hijacking got shelved for which he worked for eight years. In a recent interview, the director revealed why was his project shelved.

Did Prime Video pull down Vishal Bhardwaj's film owing to Tandav?

Speaking to Mid-Day, Vishal Bhardwaj revealed that his project on the 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was dropped by Prime Video. He added that the digital platform got cold feet following the controversy of their show Tandav and fearing another controversy, they decided to pull the plug saying, "don’t want to do anything political."

“At one point I was working on the IC814 hijack project. I worked on that for 7-8 years. I was making it for Amazon, but after Tandav, they pulled the plug saying they didn’t want to do anything political. I don’t think it was political, the whole country was humiliated, it had nothing to do with any political party. But they were so paranoid, they still are, that they didn’t want to touch anything political," revealed the director.

This was not the first film that got shelved owing to the same reason. His project based on the screen adaptation of Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s book, The Exile: The Flight of Osama Bin Laden was also shelved as no one of interested. “Osama is shelved. It was a fantastic script, but again, nobody is interested,” Vishal added.

More about Vishal Bhardwaj

Apart from being a director, he is also a  screenwriter, producer, music composer and playback singer. He is known for directing films such as Makdee, Maqbool, Omkara, 7 Khoon Maaf and Ishqiya, among others.