this has been rumored for a while but it seems vishal is now finally going through with it. this cld be interesting, and I am especially glad that dutt is no longer in it, lets just hope that vishal gets the cast right this time…

anyone have any cast suggestions??


Hail Caesar!

Subhash K Jha


Even as the debates over the box-office fate of Vishal Bharadwaj's second Shakespearean sojourn Omkara continues, the filmmaker has decided to go ahead and announce his third Shakespearean film. This time, it will be Julius Caesar. “After I did the Macbeth-inspired Maqbool, I wanted to adapt Julius Ceasar for the same producer, Bobby Bedi. But that didn't work out. I got busy with Shekhar Kapoor who wanted me to make Mantra with Preity Zinta. That didn't work out either,” says Vishal.

Vishal's original wish-list included Sanjay Dutt and Irrfan Khan as Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony respectively. “I wanted Sanjay for his sinewy sensitivity and Irrfan for his magnetic rhetorical powers,” says Vishal.

However, since his dream cast did not work out, the casting and other details will have to be reworked now.

Why this fascination for Shakespeare? “There is a scarcity of good scripts. That's why my ready-for-release film The Blue Umbrella featuring Pankaj Kapoor, is written by Ruskin Bond. Earlier I wanted to adapt an Australian short story Timbuctoo with Viveik Oberoi and Aishwarya Rai in the lead,” says Vishal. “I was fascinated by what Gulzarsaab had done with Shakespeare's A Comedy Of Errors in Angoor. In Maqbool I changed Lady Macbeth from Macbeth's wife to his mistress. In Omkara I made Konkona's character kill Saif. In the original, Iago is taken away to jail. Who would want such a tame ending for the villain today?"

Julius Caesar will also be interpreted in Vishal's own style. “We tend to think of Shakespeare as high-brow literature. But the fact is, he wrote his plays for front-benchers. As far as I'm concerned, Shakespeare has all the masala ingredients for a commercial Hindi film,” says Vishal.

But that does not mean Vishal hasn't worked on an original film. “My first film as director, Makdee was an original script. I was supposed to make an original film with Aamir Khan too,” says Vishal.

Is he trying to be the Indian Branagh?