Mohit Suri: I judged Arjun Kapoor due to his cinema family

Filmmaker Mohit Suri says before he started working with Arjun Kapoor on Half Girlfriend, he had a preconceived notion that the actor's journey in Bollywood was easy as he came from a film family.

"I hadn't finished my script (of Half Girlfriend) when Arjun called me to meet regarding something else. I pre-judged him a little that he was a producer's son, launched by a big banner, must've been trained to become an actor. As cliche as a film family could be," Mohit said.

The filmmaker says after spending time with Arjun he realised the actor has put in a lot of hard work to join movies.

"He was brought up by a single mother, a strong independent woman who worked hard and made a name for herself in a male dominated society," Mohit says.

In Half Girlfriend, Arjun plays the character of Madhav Jha, a simpleton from Bihar who falls in love with a high society Delhi girl, played by Shraddha Kapoor.

"Somewhere down the line, when you talk to Arjun about things like 'who did you date' and he'll say, 'I was fat so I couldn't get a girl.' He had the motivation to lose weight and become an actor. That's hard work and that's exactly what Madhav Jha is.

"I thought these were the traits I could use. He always felt every girl was out of his league because of how he used to look, so I picked up these traits and used it for my film."

The film is an adaptation of author Chetan Bhagat's novel of the same name, and Mohit had to carefully choose which portions from the book would make it to the big screen.

The film is scheduled to release this Friday (19).