Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; April 30, 2016)
Two years ago, in an interview to Mirror (March 6, 2014), Abhay Chopra, when asked if there was a film of his grandfather, BR Chopra or dad, Ravi Chopra, that he would want to remake, had said, “If there's a new way to tell the story, we will.“ He had then gone on to pick out his father's disaster movie, The Burning Train, from the BR film repertoire, reasoning that given the advances in technology today, it could be made into a bigger spectacle. He had also zeroed in on his granddad's Ittefaq, describing it as a “taut thriller“.Mirror has now learnt that Abhay will be remaking the Yash Chopra-directed 1969 murder mystery, Ittefaq, which featured Rajesh Khanna, Nanda and Sujit Kumar, with Sidharth Malhotra and Sonakshi Sinha in the lead. They are yet to rope in the actor who will step into 'Inspector' Sujit's shoes. The film is being produced by Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar and Abhay's brother Kapil.
Ittefaq was a remake of the British film, Signpost to Murder (1964), starring Joanne Woodward. It revolved around an artist who is arrested for the murder of his wife whom he had thrown off in a moment of frustrated rage when she distracts him from his painting and stormed out of the house. When he returns, she is dead and her sister, Bindu's testimony convicts him of the crime.He manages to break free from the hospital where he is being psychologically evaluated and breaks into the house of a rich woman only to find himself implicated in the murder of her husband.
“The film is currently in prep, the reading session with the actors will begin soon and the film will go on the floors by the year end,“ informs a source close to the production. “Abhay has been working on the script for a while now.They have changed the climax because other wise the cat would be out of the bag before the first scene is canned and contemporised the story.“ The film had no songs and most of the action happened in the course of one night.