Remembering Late Mukul S Anand: India’s Cool & Iconic Filmmaker, On His 21st Death Anniversary

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  News   Remembering Late Mukul S Anand: India’s Cool & Iconic Filmmaker, On His 21st Death Anniversary

Remembering Late Mukul S Anand: India’s Cool & Iconic Filmmaker, On His 21st Death Anniversary

Flamboyant director Mukul S Anand died during the shoot of the ambitious terrorism-themed thriller set in Afghanistan. Anand tragically died of a heart attack on September 7, 1997, in the middle of the Dus schedule, leaving the project incomplete and in the hands of his wife Anita Anand.
Sep 7, 2018, 11:27 am ISTNewsJhakaasMovies Staff
Remembering Mukul S Anand
  Remembering Mukul S Anand

Mukul S. Anand was an Indian film director and producer. He was the nephew of veteran film scriptwriter Inder Raj Anand and cousin of actor and director Tinnu Anand. Mukul died of a heart attack at the age of 45 in September 1997. At the time of his death, he was in the middle of filming the action movie Dus in Utah. The climax scenes and some action sequences were being filmed from May 1997.

His first box-office success was Insaaf (1987), the film responsible for "re-introducing" Vinod Khanna to films after a hiatus. Anand's next film, Maha-Sangram (1990), reunited him with Vinod Khanna and was acclaimed for Aditya Pancholi's angry portrayal of a Thakur. At this point, Mukul was largely considered a skillful director, who held much promise but somehow never managed to deliver solid successes.

He finally hit the big league with the Scarface-inspired crime thriller Agneepath (1990) with Amitabh Bachchan in the lead role, which won Amitabh a National Award for Best Actor. He was reunited with Bachchan for the family drama Hum (1991), which was a box-office success and featured the popular song "Jumma Chumma". He worked with Bachchan for the final time in the epic film Khuda Gawah (1992) which won him the Filmfare Best Director Award. His last completed film, Trimurti (1995), which had a multi-star cast including Jackie Shroff, Anil Kapoor, and Shahrukh Khan, failed to do well at the box office.

Hum

Sanjay Dutt and Salman Khan did their best to revive the project several times, Anita Anand told Scroll.in. “Mukul Anand started writing the film almost two years before he began filming it,” she said. “His first choice for the role was Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt as he wrote the script with them in mind.”. The film was shot in Utah to replicate scenes of the arid Afghan landscape. Forty percent of the shoot was complete by August 1997. “Stunt teams from America were hired, cameras in crash boxes [were placed] right in front of the car,” Anand said. “He was using all sorts of technology I couldn’t grasp.”.Manmohan produced another film with the same title in 2005, with Dutt and Shilpa Shetty, who was also part of the original cast of Dus. “It was not the same film as ours,” Anand clarified.

Dus

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Sanjay Dutt, Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan