Anupama Chopra sits down with Farhan Akhtar for the closing session of the Nilaya Monsoon Film Festival, recorded on the eve of Dil Chahta Hai's 25th anniversary. Akhtar traces the film from the frustration that started it — Hindi cinema's over-declared, melodramatic male friendships bearing no resemblance to how he and his friends actually spoke — through the true-or-false stories that have hardened into legend around it. He confirms that a major star wanted to buy the script and told him he wasn't capable of directing it, names him, and explains why he now believes it was a test of resolve. He recalls the six songs assembled in three and a half days at Ritesh Sidhwani's Khandala house, of which only about a day and a half was actual work; the two lyric arguments he lost to Javed Akhtar; the dream cast of Akshaye Khanna, Hrithik Roshan and Abhishek Bachchan that never came together; and the month before shoot when Saif Ali Khan nearly exited and Aamir Khan told Farhan he would have to play Sameer himself. The conversation also goes to the harder parts. Akhtar describes the only time he lost his temper on that set — when the camera ran out of film mid-take during Tara's death scene, destroying a performance he says he has never fully recovered on screen — and the run of distributors who watched the finished film, said it would never work, and walked away, along with the label executive who took a phone call during the first song and was locked out of the edit. He talks about sync sound as a discipline the actors initially resisted, the note to leave the Goa beach cleaner than the unit found it, casting his non-actor friend Asad Dadarkar as Subodh, and the two things he would change today, including leaving Sid alone at the end. Asked how a director lives with a landmark, he argues the film stopped belonging to him a long time ago. In the audience Q&A he takes on algorithms as flattery with no loyalty, the disappearance of depth and silence from contemporary frames, and why the only useful question is what you want to give a year and a half of your life to. Watch the full conversation on The Hollywood Reporter India.