Farah Khan recalled how frugally they filmed Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, and that Shah Rukh Khan would double as her assistant on set because they couldn’t afford to hire a real one.

Choreographer-filmmaker Farah Khan reflected on her first meeting with Shah Rukh Khan, and said that she knew instantly that they would get along. She also recalled anecdotes about working with Shah Rukh on the film Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, and said that because they had so little money, Shah Rukh would fill in as her ‘assistant’. In an interview, Farah said that she actually made more money than Shah Rukh on the film, whose production she described as ‘gareeb (poor) ‘.

Asked about her decades-long friendship with Shah Rukh, Farah said in an interview with Radio Nasha, “We started the shoot in 1991, and I was also new. We were in Goa, and I’d only read an interview of Shah Rukh in which he sounded very brash and arrogant. I was very scared. I remember what he was wearing and doing when we first met; Kundan Shah introduced us. Sometimes, you instantly hit it off with somebody. You feel like you’re friends from school. That’s what it was like with Shah Rukh. We had the same interests, we’d read the same books, we had the same sense of humour.”

Farah said that Shah Rukh helped her a lot during the ‘gareeb shoot’, and continued, “The budget was very low. Shah Rukh was paid Rs 25,000 for that movie. I was the highest paid person on that movie, let me tell you. I was paid Rs 5,000 per song, and there were six songs. Just because of that, I was paid Rs 30,000. We couldn’t even afford an assistant. So, that full song ‘Aana Mere Pyar Ko’, we cast regular people from Goa.”

Farah said that because the extras had no idea how to take cues or hit marks, Shah Rukh would pinch them turn by turn as a cue for them to rise up from behind a wall in the song. Farah has also directed Shah Rukh in three films — Main Hoon Na, Om Shanti Om, and Happy New Year. They weren’t on speaking terms for several years in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, but subsequently reconciled.