As the crowds laughed over Manju and Milli’s conversations or swooned over the “Khoobsurat” way Vikram spoke, there was one person who smiled to herself as it made her believe that just being herself helped her bring the characters alive on screen. Juhi Chaturvedi, an advertising executive-turned-scriptwriter, has come a long way from her days at Ogilvy & Mather.
Talking about her advertising days, she says, “There were times when I would take more than two minutes to write a 30-second ad and I was pushed to writing it quicker, mainly because I think my boss knew that I could do it. There were stories always in my mind that I picked up from everyday life. But in the advertising life, it’s not easy for an art director to become a copywriter,” she says.
Life changed when she shifted to Mumbai from Delhi and worked under Piyush Pandey and wrote the very famous Sprite ad (spoof on Mountain Dew). But things really took a turn when she moved to the Bengaluru office.
“There were so many ads to be produced and not many writers who could write in Hindi. That’s when I started working with Shoojit Sircar. He had already made Yahaan but was dabbling in the ad film industry as he was looking for his next movie. We spoke often and he approached me to write for his film Shoebite with Amitabh Bachchan,” she says, adding, “I was reluctant at first because writing for feature films was never on my mind.”
Although Shoebite never took off, the writer-director relationship did and they proceeded to make a movie that broke through the conventional norms of Bollywood films — Vicky Donor.
Be it the not-so-common saas-bahu relationship or the typical Delhi lingo spoken by Vicky (played by Ayushmann Khurana), Juhi attributes her inspiration to her days in Delhi and of course, her realistic approach to writing stories. “Let’s consider the saas-bahu relationship. At the end of the day, they are two women who spend most of their time together. So even though the saas might curse the bahu throughout the day, when they sit down for a glass of whisky at night, true words are spoken.”
Talking about her recent venture, Khoobsurat, where again we saw a very hat ke relationship between the mother and daughter, she says, “The credit for that has to go to the screenplay writers. Khoobsurat in a way was an easier project because the screenplay was already done when I was approached for it. But I think the first relationship with the mother was drawn from Sonam and Rhea Kapoor’s real life relationship with their mum.”
Juhi’s natural instinct draws her to write scripts based on realistic experiences but she has made her way through B-town by writing for and Khoobsurat to the upcoming Piku, with Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone. And while one may think that the intricacies of being politically correct for Madras Café could have thrown her out of her comfort zone, it was actually Khoobsurat that was more different for her. “I’m not used to creating larger than life love stories. Khoobsurat was just that. But Rhea knew what she wanted to do and that made it easier for me,” says Juhi.
Even then, she made sure that it was nothing unbelievable. “For me, it was important that it had to be relatable. If it is a film based on this era, then even if they are maharajas or maharanis, the way they speak has to be relatable. That’s why the way Manju, played by Kirron Kher from Delhi, speaks is different from what Ranisa, a well-educated queen from Rajasthan, speaks,” she says.
And while the world is going gaga over her work, her biggest critic is her husband. “My husband, Ashish Malhotra, who is an advertising professional, is my go-to person for criticism. He can bring to me the smallest of an error or the biggest compliment. Even, my six-year-old daughter has already started showing glimpses of her witty genes. Other than that, if there is one person I could go to with my writings, it is Shoojit, who is a dear friend. I truly believe that he can trash my writings or he can weave them into something beautiful,” she says.
