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Before Hum Tum became one of Hindi cinema’s most cherished love stories, the people making it were barely speaking to each other.

Director Kunal Kohli’s 2004 film gave audiences Karan and Rhea, played by Saif Ali Khan and Rani Mukerji, two people who kept circling each other before finally giving in. It had the warmth of a classic rom-com and the wit of something sharper. Twenty-two years on, it still holds up. What audiences never saw, though, was how close the whole thing came to falling apart behind the scenes.

Kohli, in conversation with NDTV, recounted about what the early days of the shoot actually looked like. The short version: nobody was getting along with Saif in one corner, and Rani and the director in the other. “They were not particularly fond of each other off-screen. For the first half of the shoot it felt like team Rani and me, and Saif alone. Saif and I didn’t like each other and Saif and Rani didn’t like each other,” he said.

It was during the Amsterdam schedule that Kohli decided to address it directly. He pulled Saif aside and put it to him plainly. “Listen, this film is very important. If it doesn’t work, you will not be a solo hero. You’ll only be doing second leads to Shah Rukh Khan like in Kal Ho Naa Ho. So let’s make this work.”

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That conversation, Kohli says, changed the atmosphere almost immediately. “After that we got along really well. Then all of us started to get along. But in the beginning Rani and Saif didn’t get on, me and Saif didn’t get on; me and Rani did. It was just… no.”

Kohli is candid about what caused the friction in the first place. There was no single incident or falling out. They were, as he puts it, “young, bratty people” with attitude. “Only Rani had come with big hits; Saif and I hadn’t. But we still had a lot of attitude.” Then there was the kiss.

A romantic scene in the title track required Rani Mukerji to share an on-screen kiss, which in the early 2000s still carried enough weight to cause hesitation. Rani was reluctant and eventually agreed to a single take. That take, Kohli admits, was not quite what anyone had hoped for. “We were shooting that whole night. At first she said she wouldn’t do the kiss. Finally she said, ‘Okay, I’ll do one take.'”

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What followed left producer Aditya Chopra bemused when the footage came in. “If you watch the take she’s actually laughing; she’s lying on her side and moving because she’s laughing. When I saw it in the edit I thought, she’s laughing. So yeah, it’s got to be one of the worst kisses of Hindi cinema.”

None of it, in the end, stopped Hum Tum from becoming what it became. The film found its audience, Saif Ali Khan found his footing as a leading man, and Kohli got the love story he had set out to tell. The friction, the attitude, the laughing through the kiss, all of it dissolved somewhere between the arguments and the final cut.

In an earlier YRF video also featuring Rani, Saif had recalled the shoot of the kiss. He said that Rani was ‘extra nice’ to him and asked how he was doing and how his drive to the set was. “You said, ‘Listen, you say that you don’t want to kiss me.’ So I said, ‘I can’t say that! My boss has told me, so I have to do it.’ You said, ‘Listen, I don’t think we should do it,’” he said.

Saif then mimicked Rani saying reluctantly, “Okay, we will do it.” He said, “It was the worst kiss in the history of cinema, it was so uncomfortable. It made me so uncomfortable because you were so uncomfortable.”

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