September 16, 2010 (Sampurn Wire): Malayalam maverick Mohanlal is back with a film directed by the prolific Priyadarshan, the director's 40th film with the versatile actor!

If all had gone well, Mohanlal would have been back in Bollywood for Vishal Bharadwaj's Saat Khoon Maaf where he was to play one of Priyanka Chopra's 7 husbands. Now the magical Mohanlal is making a comeback to Hindi cinema in Priyadarshan's new thriller to be shot on a speeding train in London from September. This, emphasize both Mohanlal and Priyadarshan, is not a remake of The Bullet Train.

This would be Mohanlal's first foray into Hindi cinema since the disastrous Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag. As in Varma's Company Mohanlal's role has been modified to suit his personality in accent.

In Priyadarshan's film, Mohanlal plays a Malayali cop in Britain. In Company he had played a South India police commissioner. In both cases the characters were altered for Mohanlal's sake.

The straight-talking softspoken Mohanlal shocks you when he says he has no clue why he didn't do Saat Khoon Maaf. "I was on for the role. I had been finalized and signed. I was not even told why my services were not needed. But I'd rather not talk about this. I'd rather focus on talking about Priyan's film. Would it have been such an exciting thing for me to return to Hindi cinema with Priyan if I had already done another Hindi film recently? I haven't asked Priyan what my role is. He told me he needed me for a cameo. And I agreed. The language is not really important. I am shooting a terrorist drama Khandahar right now and it's hard to say what the language of the film is. The characters speak in Malayalam, Hindi and English. I think cinema now transcends all linguistic barriers."

Adds Priyadarshan, "I've done 39 films with Mohanlal so far. For the last eight years we haven't worked together. I was busy doing remakes of Mohanlal films with Akshay Kumar. I thought it was high time that I did something again with the original. Mohanlal didn't even ask me what his role in the film was. That's the level of trust we have."

-- Subhash K Jha / Sampurn Wire