Kamna Chandra on working with Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra, and where Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas went wrong | Bollywood News
Kamna Chandra was one of the very few women screenwriters of Hindi cinema back in the early 1980s. In many ways, she paved the way for screenwriters like Honey Irani, Sooni Taraporewala, and Juhi Chaturvedi. She’s worked with late legendary filmmakers like Raj Kapoor on Prem Rog (1982) and Yash Chopra (Chandni, 1989). She also co-wrote 1942: A Love Story (1994) with director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who later became her son-in-law. In an exclusive interview with SCREEN, Kamna breaks down her 40-year-plus journey. You didn’t have any connections to the film industry. And it was nonetheless an uphill climb for any woman screenwriter to get her script greenlit in the early 1980s. How did you then land a film as seminal as Raj Kapoor’s Prem Rog (1982)? I’d written extensively before that also, but for magazines, radio, and television in Delhi. People had just started warming up to television back then. My husband, who worked at a multinational company, got transferred to Mumbai. So, excitement sparked within me that I can try writing for films …
