Remo D'Souza breaks silence on reports of him offering Abhishek Bachchan's Be Happy to Salman Khan: 'I don't know...'

Remo D’Souza says his new film Be Happy, about the bond between a father and daughter, has no similarity with one of the scripts he wrote for Salman Khan. Be Happy, featuring Abhishek Bachchan and Inayat Verma, will release on Prime Video on March 14.

Remo had pitched a father-daughter story to Salman Khan in 2017 and it was reportedly titled Dancing Dad. "I don’t know how the tentative title of that film came about. That film was something else; that script is still with Salman sir. There is no similarity between this script and that script," Remo told PTI. "I’ve many such scripts of father-daughter. It's not like there is only one. There’s one film that we are also trying to make with Nassar sir . It is not related to dance but something different," he added.

The director-choreographer, who has written Be Happy with Kanishka Singh Deo and Chirag Garg, said the film challenged him in getting the emotional quotient of his characters correct. The director said the idea for the movie took shape in 2020 following the COVID-19 lockdown.

"Apart from commercial films, which I’ve made like the ABCD franchise, I make sure that whatever films I do, I incorporate some real-life incident or experience that I’ve had into my films. So, some portions of Be Happy are real; for instance, the character of Shiv is thematically similar to my father. The film may seem to be about dance, but it’s not based on dance; it’s a father-daughter story, and more. There are other elements like the emotional aspect, which were a little difficult to get, but we eventually got it nicely", Remo said.

Remo said he is actively working on the third part of his dance-musical franchise, ABCD. "No dance-based films are being made today. ABCD 3 will come for sure. We will have actors in it who know dance," he said. The franchise started with 2013's ABCD: Anybody Can Dance, fronted by actor-choreographer-director Prabhu Deva, and the makers followed it up with a sequel, titled ABCD 2, in 2015, which featured Shraddha Kapoor and Varun Dhawan in the lead.

Be Happy, also features Nora Fatehi, Nassar, Johny Lever and Harleen Sethi. The film is produced under the banner of Remo Dsouza Entertainment Pvt Ltd by D’Souza’s wife, Lizelle Remo D'Souza. (With inputs from PTI)