Farhan Akhtar on His Mother Honey Irani’s Creative Contribution to Dil Chahta Hai: “She Has a Great Sense of Humour”

Long before Farhan Akhtar made Dil Chahta Hai, he had a formidable screenwriter at home to turn to. His mother, Honey Irani, had already spent years writing for Hindi cinema, and when Farhan finished the early draft of his directorial debut, she was among the people he trusted enough to read it.

Twenty-five years after Dil Chahta Hai, Akhtar has revealed how much her instincts as a writer and particularly her ability to look at a script purely as an audience member, helped shape the film.

Speaking to The Juggernaut, Akhtar said his mother brought a quality to his writing that he valued enormously: an ability to know when a scene needed to be felt rather than explained. “She’s got a great sense of humour. You know, that’s one. And the other thing that she has is, she has this amazing ability to read the script from a very genuine audience point of view. So she doesn’t get into a place of wanting to over-intellectualise stuff. Or wanting to unnecessarily be deep when something can be made to be felt without trying to be too artistic about it. You know, or the pseudo art, if you want to call it that,” he said.

That, he said, was where Irani’s contribution became particularly valuable. Rather than asking him to make the film more intellectual or weightier, she helped him loosen it up. “That’s really where she really helped me with was just lightening up a few moments,” he added.

One of those moments became one of the film’s most memorable comic beats. Farhan recalled the sequence where Akash encounters a man who appears to be approaching Shalini in a threatening manner. In his original version, Akash simply watched the man walk away. Irani suggested something far less expected. “The thing that she, when she read the script, this beat came from her, which is when Aamir comes running back and hugs the hobo.”

Farhan explained that he had originally written the moment differently, with Akash looking at the man before he turned and walked away. His mother suggested that Akash should instead run back and hug him, an unexpected move that immediately defused the tension and made the scene funnier. It was precisely the kind of instinct Farhan valued in Irani about finding a small human beat that made the scene work.

The influence went beyond individual scenes. Farhan also drew from his own family while writing the film’s parents, particularly Sid’s relationship with his mother. He has described that bond as the parental relationship he focused on most closely, acknowledging the personal connection to his own upbringing. He said, “To me, that was the one that I think… I wanted to focus on that and I feel somewhere, I think a little homage, you know, or a little tipping my hand to my own mom, who brought Zoya and me up as a single mom for most of it. And was really our strength.”

Honey Irani’s presence in Dil Chahta Hai wasn’t simply that of a famous screenwriter giving her son notes. Her influence was embedded in the way he approached emotion, humour and character. She helped him trust the audience, resist the temptation to over-explain and, in at least one memorable scene, make the unexpected choice that made the moment land. For a filmmaker making his first film, that may have been one of the most valuable notes of all. Fromher, the brilliance descends!