Karan Johar found directing newcomers to be a challenging task

Karan Johar stepped away from his usual filmmaking rituals for his latest release, Student of the Year. For one, this was his shortest movie. A director known for rolling out particularly long sagas, Karan chose to keep Student of the Year short. Apart from that, the film was Karan’s first directorial venture without his close friend and lucky charm, Shah Rukh Khan, in the lead. Instead, Karan chose to settle for three newcomers to grace the lead. Obviously, given the fact that this was Karan’s first without seasoned actors, the film was indeed a challenge for the director.

“You Know I think I was more stressed out than them, because you have to deconstruct your own ways of directing. You kind of get into a pattern with movie stars specially with Shah Rukh, and I think I got into a pattern as a director directing him and other movie stars, so I had to kind of deconstruct my own thought process. I found myself giving them really archaic instructions – telling them things like the way Shah Rukh may have done it, over instructing them, giving them stardom instructions and bringing them into your movie frame.”

The film’s lead, Siddharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt have indeed managed to charm audiences with their debut and have pulled off their respective roles exceptionally well. “Sometimes you need to let people be, which what I was not doing in my first 20 days of work. I was behaving like a really prehistoric, dated and been there done that kind of filmmaker (chuckles). Then I realized that if I am launching new talent I have to leverage from their roughness, their rawness and I shouldn’t over instruct them. Eventually it became fun because I kind of began feeding off their energy,” added Karan Johar.

Karan Johar’s film Student of the Year released on the 19th of October, 2012. This campus romance was proclaimed a blockbuster and received rave reviews.