‘Azhar’ director all praise for Neeraj Pandey

Emraan Hashmi starrer ‘Azhar’ is all set to release on Friday. The film is based on the real life story on ex-cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin who was implicated in a cricket match-fixing scandal in 2000, and banned by BCCI for life. While the promotions for the film are in a full swing, the director of the movie Tony D’Souza talked��about his film, and his admiration for director Neeraj Pandey whose next movie is ‘MS Dhoni – The Untold Story’.

The director said to Bollywood Life about the challenges he faced, “First of all, I would like to clear that Azhar is NOT a biopic. It is a movie based on the life and times of Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin and his controversial career. I have followed his career closely and have known Azhar bhai personally for years and therefore, it was pretty interesting to work on this project.”

Talking about the obvious way stories will be told of two cricketers in both his film and Pandey’s, he said, “Neeraj Pandey who is directing Dhoni is an ace filmmaker and he is one of my favourites. I am sure that he has done a great job with the flick. There is no leverage to Azhar just because it is released first because, MS Dhoni is a movie to watch out for.” The filmmaker in fact went to say that if he were given a choice between ‘Azhar’ and ‘MS ‘Dhoni – The Untold Story’, he would choose the latter because he is Pandey’s fan.

In ‘Azhar’, Hashmi is playing the role of cricketer Azharuddin, Nargis Fakhri plays Sangeeta Bijlani and Prachi Desai Azhar’s first wife Naureen.