Negi would later become involved in the development of the 2007 Hindi-language film
Chak De India. Its screenplay was written by screenwriter
Jaideep Sahni. Sahni had read an article about the winning of the Gold at the
2002 Commonwealth Games by the
India women's national field hockey team and thought that the premise would make an interesting film. Negi has often been compared with Kabir Khan in the media. On this connection Negi later commented, "This movie is not a documentary of Mir Ranjan Negi's life. It is in fact the story of a team that becomes a winning lot from a bunch of hopeless girls [...] There is nothing called
World Championships in international hockey. It would be stupid to believe that Yash Raj Films would pump in Rs.45
crores to make a documentary on me. So it's illogical that it is a documentation of my life." Sahni further stated in an interview with
The Hindu: :I felt why has the girls' team been given so little coverage. I shared the idea with Aditya (Chopra). He liked it and said stop everything else and concentrate on it. I started my research by spending time with hockey players [...] It's just a matter of chance that Negi's story matches with Kabir Khan. There are many cases, like in Colombia, football players are killed for not performing well for the club. I had no idea about Negi's story while writing the script, and he joined us after the script was ready. In fact, his name was suggested by
M.K. Kaushik, who was the coach of the team that won the
Commonwealth Games’ gold. On day one, when Negi read the script, he cried and it was then that we came to know about his story. Sahni also stated in another interview with NDTV.com that the script was conceived before he met Negi: :"Our script was written a year and a half back. It is very unfortunate that something, which is about women athletes, has just started becoming about Negi. And if you would go and ask Negi, he would probably tell you that he came and read the script that was written a year and a half back, and he started crying. Next day, he came and said look, it had happened to me also." Both Kaushik and Negi did influence the development of the film after being approached by Sahni. Sahni first met with Kaushik and later recalled that, "M K Kaushik and his girls taught us all we knew about hockey. Then he recommended Negi to us, because when we finished from different backgrounds and cultures, the psychological factors involved. Also how the coach faces pressure to select girls from different states and teams." Negi also had to train Shahrukh Khan for the film stating, "I had to plan every hockey move shown in the movie, including the penalty stroke that SRK missed. That shot alone took us nearly 20 hours as I was keen that it should be very realistic. I took the help of a lot of my former teammates. But more importantly, it was so easy working with SRK. He is unbelievably modest and was willing to do as many re-takes as we wanted." ==Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa==