Describing his first meeting with Alia, Imtiaz told Mid-day he met her when she had come with her mother Soni Razdan to the screening of Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana. “It was a very good film. It was the screening of that film where I had seen her mum. I went to meet her, and there was this girl standing, wearing a skirt and she was looking like a young woman… her film Student of the Year had been released. I had not seen it.”

“Then I started talking to her and I realized there was some warmth in her, her emotional quotient was very high. I was very drawn to talk to her and she was talking very nicely. In fact, I steered the conversation towards Highway without actually telling her. I started to talk to her about deeper things, like home and society, just to draw her out into that kind of... and I started to hear her true voice. This is the kind of voice that doesn’t change that much with age.

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“And let me tell you, I always wanted to cast a slightly elder woman, of at least 30 years of age, a more mature woman who has had experiences of the type that she was going to talk about in the film. I didn’t want a young person in the film. But after meeting her I realized what I was looking for was this emotional depth which this little girl has, and then it became a very interesting package for me and further then I was like, I hope she does the film,” Imtiaz recalls.

He had later handed the script to Alia, and did not hear back from her immediately, as she wasn’t sure she’d be able to deliver on the job. He even enlisted Alia’s father Mahesh Bhatt’s help.

“Then I was up at her house, telling her dad, why don’t you tell her to do my film because I gave her the script, and the script was just like a 20-30 pager, it was written like a novella. So, she read it, and I said you call me and tell me what you think. She did not call me for a day. And I was like why hasn’t she called me? Maybe she doesn’t want to do it. Then I realized she was actually a bit hesitant. So, then I asked her over the phone, ‘Did you like it?’ And she said, ‘I loved it.’ I was like, ‘Oh so will you do it?’ She said, ‘Can we talk about it?’ When an actor says that, it means that she doesn’t want to do it. So, I was up at her house and she was hesitant and then Bhatt Saab was putting in a good word for me.

“She said, ‘I don’t know whether I will be able to do all of what is written in this document. There is no scene in which I am not there. Everything is just me.’ So I said, don’t worry, we will sink together if we have to.”