Sunny Deol and Rajkumar Santoshi have been a flop-proof, sure shot actor-director combination since their maiden collaboration, 1990 vigilante action film Ghayal. They repeated its success with the 1993 courtroom drama Damini and the 1996 action film Ghatak. But post that, the two didn’t collaborate for 30 years. They’re finally reuniting now with the Partition drama Batwara 1947, backed by Aamir Khan Productions, which is slated to release in cinemas on August 14.Sunny, Rajkumar Santoshi clear the airIt was believed that while Santoshi wanted to cast Sunny in his 2002 period drama The Legend of Bhagat Singh, creative differences and scheduling conflicts prompted his exit, and eventually, Ajay Devgn’s entry as he played the titular character. Sunny went on to produce another film on the revolutionary around the same time, titled 23rd March 1931: Shaheed, which starred Bobby Deol as Singh and was helmed by Guddu Dhanoa.However, addressing the media on Tuesday in Mumbai, both Sunny and Santoshi cleared the air and maintained that there was no bad blood between the two. “There’s nothing like that. We were trying to do a film for quite some time since the early 2000s. Raj had narrated films on Asoka and Prithviraj Chauhan to me, but nothing was materializing because the producers didn’t think we were saleable,” revealed Sunny.However, the box-office success of Sunny’s cross-border action drama Gadar 2 in 2023 opened several doors, including one from Aamir Khan, who wanted to sign Sunny for the lead role of a Muslim man who protects an elderly Hindu woman (Shabana Azmi) in Lahore post Partition in Batwara 1947. “We were sitting on this story since 2010, but we were fortunate that Aamir wanted to do this film since he had heard it much earlier,” added the actor. A still from Gadar: Ek Prem Katha.Batwara vs. GadarA narration of Batwara 1947 also took place at Sunny’s residence, where his entire family, including late father Dharmendra was present. The legendary actor got emotional, given the film’s story comes very close to his own family’s. He even watched and loved the film before breathing his last this past November. “We’re a joint family from Punjab. Partition was mostly felt there. I’d heard a lot of stories in my childhood from my grandparents and other relatives. So, when Raj narrated it to me, I already had these stories within me,” said Sunny. “The most heartbreaking thing about Partition is that it should’ve never happened because so many innocent people died then. It’s always the innocent who die,” he added.The actor has made a career out of these Partition dramas, as even his 2001 seminal blockbuster Gadar, helmed by Anil Sharma, also revolved around Tara Singh, an Indian Sikh man fighting Pakistan in order to protect his wife from the neighbouring country, Sakina (Ameesha Patel). In the trailer of Batwara 1947, he’s seen fighting Pakistan yet again, this time to protect a Hindu woman whom he considers his mother. But Sunny dismissed any similarities between the two characters.“Tara Singh was a very fun-loving guy. He was a romantic Sardar who loved music. When he saw a girl who was way above his level, he never imagined he’d marry her. It was just a pure love story of the truck driver, the girl, and the family. I never even got a chance like that in this film,” said Sunny, laughing. In Batwara 1947, he’s already married to Preity Zinta’s characters and has grown-up children, as the family is forced to flee India after Partition and relocate to Lahore.Story continues below this adAlso Read — The Odyssey, Spider-Man, Obsession: Is Hollywood dominating Indian cinema this year?Santoshi also agrees with Sunny that his character in their new film bears no resemblance to that in the Gadar franchise. “”Tara Singh fights for his own right. Our character fights for someone else, and he goes to a great extent at the cost of his own family. I’m confident I can write good action heroes, whether it’s Ghatak or Ghayal, but the character I’ve written for Sunny in this film, I rate it better than Superman, Iron Man, and all the superheroes put together. Because people can fight an individual, a group, and an army, but here, Sunny is fighting against fanaticism. The best of them can’t stand tall against it,” argued the filmmaker.