He recalled, “I was getting a lot of offers and I had signed over nine films, thinking that the rest of the actors were doing 30, 40, 50 films. I thought under 10 should be okay. Then I realised—I’ve never worked like that. When the shootings began, I understood what a big mistake I’d made. I’m not built to do two or three or even eight or nine films together. That was my first realisation.”

His second realisation was even more fundamental: the director matters above everything else.

“The director is the captain of the ship,” Aamir said. “When I read a script, I imagine it being shot in Kashmir. The director imagines Khandala. And the producer has already booked Film City because there are two hills there. That’s when I understood how misalignment can destroy a film.”

Within just nine months of his career, Aamir learned what would become his guiding principle: a film must have three non-negotiables—the right script, the right director, and the right producer.

“Unless these three are ticked off,” he said, “I won’t be able to do a film. After QSQT, I wasn’t happy with the work I was doing. My sensibilities didn’t match with people I was working with. To cut a long story short, these films started releasing eventually. Three films flopped and I was labelled a one-film wonder. And the films that were yet to release—I knew how bad they were.”

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The failure crushed him. “I felt sunk. My career is going to go down the drain. I used to come home and cry in evening. I swore I would never compromise again unless I trusted the script, director and producer—even if it meant the end of my career. I felt like I was in quicksand.”

It was during this fragile time that Mahesh Bhatt reached out with a film offer. Aamir was ecstatic—Bhatt was at the peak of his creative powers after Saaransh, Arth and Naam. But when Bhatt narrated the script, Aamir didn’t like it.

“I didn’t tell him immediately. I took a day. That night was the turning point of my life,” he shared. “Saying yes to Bhatt saab would have given me stability. It would have let me sustain three more films because I’d be doing a Bhatt project. Practically, it made every bit of sense to say yes—but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t sleep.”

The next day, he made the hardest decision of his life.

“I met him and said no. I was honest—I told him I didn’t like the script. That film never happened. But that one decision, at a time when everything was going wrong, gave me the strength to take all the tough decisions in my career ahead. It gave me the courage to do films like Lagaan and Taare Zameen Par.”