When 'Ishaqzaade' released, I was going through hell. It didn't matter what I said or did, because I had lost my mother.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My granddad passed away a month before I started shooting for 'Ishaqzaade,' and my mom died just before the film's release, both within a year of each other.
I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'
When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, 'Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.'
I've gone through hell and back.
My biggest regret is that my mother didn't see me walk on to that London Palladium stage, being the star she always wanted me to be. But I always say that when she reached Heaven, she had a word with a few agents.
I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.
In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic.
My first film, 'Ishaqzaade,' did well, and I got four damn good films because of it.
I remember when I watched 'Hellraiser' with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours.