Abbas Tyrewala says Vishal Bhardwaj ensured he was decently paid for Maqbool: ‘He didn’t take money for co-writing’ | Bollywood FilmyMeet

Maqbool is considered one of the best works of Vishal Bhardwaj which was an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The film’s co-writer and film producer Abbas Tyrewala recently revealed how writers were not well-paid at that time. Abbas, in an interview with Cyrus Broacha on his YouTube channel said that in-spite of being a co-writer, Vishal did not take any money for Maqbool. (Also read: Shahid Kapoor to work with Triptii Dimri in new Vishal Bharadwaj film: ‘Super pumped for this one’)

Abbas Tyrewala on working with Vishal Bhardwaj

While speaking about his association with Bollywood filmmakers, Abbas stated that Vishal Bhardwaj, Rajkumar Hirani and Farah Khan had a lot of influence in his life. 

When asked about who paid him the most, he said, “No one paid me. Those were not days when writers got paid. The closest I have come to being decently paid is when poor Vishal Bhardwaj said, ‘I can’t give you so little money,’ because that was the budget for the writer. Even though he was joint screenplay writer, he didn’t take any money himself and gave it all to me. Those were not the days when writers were well-paid. He was capable of gestures like that.”

Maqbool featured Irrfan Khan, Tabu and Pankaj Kapur in pivotal characters. The film also starred Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Piyush Mishra, Murali Sharma, Deepak Dobriyal, Shweta Menon, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Dayashankar Pandey and others.

Abbas Tyrewala’s Bollywood career 

Abbas is known for making his directorial debut with Imran Khan-Genelia Deshmukh starrer Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na produced by Aamir Khan. His last directorial was Jhootha Hi Sahi featuring John Abraham. Abbas is also credited for writing dialogues for popular Bollywood films such as Bang Bang (2014) and War (2019). He also wrote the dialogues for Siddharth Anand’s spy action-thriller Pathaan (2023) produced by Aditya Chopra. The movie featured Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, Dimple Kapadia, Ashuotsh Rana, Prakash Belawadi, Ekta Kaul, Manish Wadhwa and others in pivotal characters.