Imran Khan Turns 41, A Lookback At Why Delhi Belly Script Took 15 Years To Get Noticed

Imran Khan, who is turning 41 tomorrow, January 13, is all set to return to the big screen. The actor was last seen in the 2015 film Katti Batti and since then he has been a break. On the occasion of his birthday, let's go down memory lane and talk about his cult film Delhi Belly. Do you know it took 15 years for the script to get noticed and just 5 minutes to get approved? No, then here we are with the detailed information.

Delhi Belly was written 15 years ago before hitting the big screens?

In an interview with Film Companion, writer Akshat Verma recalled the journey of scripting Delhi Belly to finally shooting it with Imran Khan, Vir Das and Kunaal Roy Kapur. The director revealed that when he was studying master's in 1996, he wrote the story of Delhi Belly and from 1997 he started sending the scripts to various production houses. However, he didn't hear from any, until a German producer liked the idea and showed interest in making the film. He tried for a year-and-a-half but it wasn't working out and he parted ways.

When Ankit Verma met Aamir Khan for Delhi Belly

The actor revealed that it was in 2006, that he came to Mumbai and started knocking on the doors of each production house physically. Recalling the time when they dropped off their script after getting rejected from UTV, Verma said, "On the last day of the trip, we dropped off the script at the Aamir Khan Productions' accounting office. The accounting office was empty because everyone had gone to lunch. Just as we were leaving, someone came back. I will forever be grateful to her because she took the script and made sure that it reached Aamir."

A week later after he returned to Los Angeles, he got an email from Aamir, "which said 'When can you come back? I want to do this film, can you pull the script from every other place you've sent it?' And this is how the took Verma 15 years to get noticed and just 5 minutes to get the project going. Aamir not only liked the script but also made a cameo appearance in the film.

More about Delhi Belly

Released in 2011, the film was given an 'A' certificate for its profanity, intense violence and sexual content. It opened to mixed reviews but grossed ₹360 million in the first week of screening in India and US$1.6 million overseas. The film was remade in Tamil as Settai.