16 December,2025 07:05 AM IST | Mumbai | Mohar Basu
(L-R) Sanjay Chopra with wife Tisca
When Saali Mohabbat was shaping up, Tisca Chopra wanted to act in the film as well as direct it. Producer Manish Malhotra, however, urged her to choose only one role. After she committed to directing, she understood why he had advised so.
"Directing is a mother-of-God hard job. It just never ends," laughs Chopra, who turned feature film director with the Zee5 movie. "You start your day with a volley of questions. What should be the size of the car's number plate? Should the actor shave his chest or not? If you don't answer, they'll think that you don't know your mind. So, you just have to make a decision, even if it's wrong. And then you make it the right decision."
What helped was that Chopra knew the world of the Radhika Apte and Divyenndu-led murder mystery intimately. She had written the howdunnit with her husband Sanjay Chopra, a pilot. Ask her the experience of co-writing with her husband, and she quips, "We almost got divorced writing it. His sense of writing is robust, mine is more subtle. So the yin and yang came together nicely in the script."
Days after its release, the first-time feature director has only one grouse with Saali Mohabbat - that a word in one of its songs had to be dropped at the insistence of the internal legal team. "We were told in the beginning [to drop it], but we still went ahead and recorded it. Then we had to dub it to something else," says Chopra, unconvinced by the idea of censorship. "I'm not a big fan of censorship. If at 18 years, you can choose a government, why can't you choose what you want to watch?"
