3 min readNew DelhiMar 12, 2026 03:45 PM IST
Pooja Bhatt started her career as an actor under her father Mahesh Bhatt and over the years, she started producing and directing films, but to date, Pooja is most fondly remembered for her work in films like Sadak, Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin, Zakhm, among others. The 1991 film Sadak was one of her earlier films, directed by Mahesh, and it also starred Sanjay Dutt. The film had a scene that required the two lead characters to kiss, and Sanjay refused to kiss Pooja, which led Mahesh to calling him a hypocrite.
In her podcast, The Pooja Bhatt Show, she recalled that her father Mahsh always told her that while filming intimate scenes, “it’s never the act, it’s the attitude.” She recalled that this lesson was taught to her when she had to film a kissing scene with Sanjay. “I had to kiss Sanjay Dutt and I wanted to crawl under the nearest rock,” she recalled and added that Sanjay rejected the idea as he had seen Pooja as a child. “He said, ‘I am not going to kiss her, I have seen her as a child’.”
Mahesh heard him and called him a hypocrite as Pooja recalled, “So my father said, ‘That’s complete hypocrisy. If you can’t kiss her, then you have no business kissing anybody else’s daughter’.”
Pooja Bhatt and Mahesh Bhatt worked extensively in the 1990s in films like Daddy, Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin, Sadak, Tadipaar, Naaraaz and Zakhm. He stopped directing films after 1999’s Kartoos, and took on a more advisory role in Vishesh Films.
But, he returned to direction in 2020 with Sadak 2 which had a cameo by Pooja, and it starred Sanjay Dutt, Aditya Roy Kapur and Alia Bhatt. He stated at the time that he had only done this film for his daughter Alia. The film was released during the pandemic and went straight to streaming. It received largely negative reviews.
In a 2024 chat with SCREEN, Mahesh Bhatt called himself a “has-been” and “outdated” director and said that he won’t be returning to direction. “I don’t have the thirst to leave my footprints on the sands of time, which is paramount in the entertainment world. Those who make it, have an insatiable thirst to leave their footprints on the sands of time,” he said.
