Director Rajkumar Hirani has confirmed what we had already suspected, that much of the empathy in Sanju was manufactured. The filmmaker revealed that he shot additional portions for the biographical drama based on actor Sanjay Dutt to create empathy towards him since the audience "hated" him in test screenings. "During the shoot, I felt 'What am I doing, I'm going wrong.' In fact, when the first edit was ready and we screened for people, they hated him. They said we don't like this man, we don't want to watch him," he said.

The result of this was the inclusion of the scene where Dutt attempts suicide after the verdict is out. "He had mentioned it to me but we didn't put in the film, I shot it later. It was not in the original script," he said. However, Hirani denied whitewashing Dutt's life to make it palatable for the audience and did say that Dutt had done many questionable things in his lifetime but was inherently a nice man. 

"My perception of Sanju was that he has done so many weird things but he is not a bad man... I felt he had an innocence, he is naughty but he doesn't harm anyone. He didn't pick up the gun, scared people or fired a shot. He made a mistake," he added.

The 55-year-old admitted that he would love to see director Anurag Kashyap's take on the film, adding that the events in the Munna Bhai MBBS actor's life can each be a standalone movie.