Devdas In NYC!
Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai address a press conference at The Mark Hotel, New York. Posters of their latest film Devdas fill the background.
The duo recently attended the Cannes Film Festival, where Devdas won rave reviews. Madhuri Dixit-Nene and Jackie Shroff, also starring in the film, were conspicuous by their absence in Cannes as well as in New York.
Director Sanjay Leela Bhansali did not attend the New York press conference.
Devdas In NYC!
Aishwarya puts on her dazzling smile and charm as she bowls over New Yorkers.
At the press conference, she stated, "It was when Sanjay (Leela Bhansali) narrated the script to me almost two years ago that I really heard the story for the first time.
I then made a conscious effort not to see the earlier films - I wanted to go in to this project with no mental frame of reference whatsoever.
I wanted my Paro to be Sanjay's interpretation of the character and to do that, I needed to stay free of any conceptions based on what previous actresses had done with the role."
The chain-smoking, wisecracking giant of the Bollywood box-office Shah Rukh Khan seemed to dominate the press conference.
Famous words from the conference: "I normally never drink, but for this film, I drank. I'll tell you, life can be very hard. Imagine, it is two in the morning and I have to drink Bacardi and have Madhuri (Dixit, who plays Chandramukhi in the film) fawn all over me on one side while Ash is dancing for me on the other - I tell you, life sucks!"
Devdas is the Shah Rukh's and Ash's third film together - the first was Mansoor Khan's Josh (in which they were siblings) and the second was Aditya Chopra's Mohabbatein (in which Ash was Shah Rukh's dead love).
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas is the third film based on the same subject. The first one was directed by P C Barua and starring K L Saigal (1935). The second was directed by Bimal Roy and starring Dilip Kumar, Suchitra Sen and Vyjayanthimala (1955).
Bhansali's Devdas will release on July 12 worldwide.