After changing Vidya Balan’s image in Bollywood by casting her as Silk in ‘The Dirty Picture’, director Milan Luthria is planning on doing the same with Akshay Kumar.

The director, who works with Akshay Kumar for the first time in ‘Once Upon a Time in Mumbai 2’, plans on exploring Akshay Kumar’s dark side.

“The whole idea is to pick up a challenge. I want to catch the certain dark, emotional and subtle style of Akshay which I feel has not been explored much. When you present such a big star in a different way it adds a lot of intrigue for his fans,” the director told PTI in an interview.

The director said that though his movie was inspired by the era in which gangsters ruled Mumbai, he said that movie isn’t based on Dagwood Ibrahim or Chhota Shakeel.

The director also said that the movie was fictional with lots of large doses of fiction but set up in an era that will remind the audience of gangsters. The director actually considers second installment of ‘Once Upon a Time in Mumbai’ to be a ‘love triangle’.

“I would not call it a gangster film at all. It is about people from underworld who have high sense of drama and lead high voltage life. It is actually more of a love triangle in the tradition of Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. It is large doses of fiction with some reality in it,” he said.

“What I am trying to do is to recreate an era where gangsters had gangster friends. Some of these friendships did not turn out well. They also had this fascination for Bollywood actresses and courted them. These are the elements that I have picked up,” he said.

The director said that his movie making was hugely inspired by the 70’s because he grew up watching the movies “which has larger than life quality and where heroes speak the language of flamboyance and drama”.

After a string of comedies Akshay Kumar too is looking forward to make a comeback into his action genre.