 Hello, how are you? Hello, hello sir. I'm good, hi. Stupid reactions to an info. Well, it's wonderful to meet you. How are you during this whole self-isolation? I'm good. We've been watching a lot of old noir. We're doing a Hitchcock and a Fritz Lang. Oh, really? Which was big. Yeah. That's awesome. What's your favorite Hitchcock film? I don't know that far too many. You can't say anything. Anything from frenzy to rope to, I don't know, psycho. My own you too much everything. A whole lot of stuff. But we're now watching a lot of old movies. I just saw The Lodger and I saw Young and Innocent. That's awesome. Yeah, I love, Hitchcock obviously is amazing. I don't have to tell you that. But thank you so much for joining us. And I wanted to ask you during this kind of almost self-isolation that's going through. How is it going for you as a writer? Is it more helpful as a writer being able to just sit down and being able to write as much as you want? Or is it actually more painstaking? I have not been able to write at all. There, perfect. Yeah, there it is. Thank you. Sorry about that. But yeah, I've actually been trying to write. There's a movie I was shooting just before the lockdown happened and I had three, four days away from the shoot. And I kind of wrote some scenarios for that, which is my book In Progress. And the other writing that I was supposed to do last two and a half weeks, I have actually not been writing at all. Really? And so you said you had four days left on a current shoot? Yeah, I had four days left. So I still have four days left. So whenever the lockdown gets over, I finish my thing. Oh, dang. So is this break from writing frustrating or is it actually nice? No, I write in a flow. When I write, I write in a flow. Yeah. I think it's like a burst of, it's always a burst. So I write and I sit and I'll write till I finish. It often always happens very close to shoot. So I always know what I'm going to do and I narrate everything to people and get the team together and I write just before we're going into the shoot. So normally that's how writing happens. So you figure out one. Yeah, that actually, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. OK. So you're one of those writers that doesn't write every single day. You almost write when inspiration happens and kind of like that. More like that than like that. I write when inspiration happens and I write in a burst. I write to finish. When I write, I finish my job. And then I keep doing corrections as I go along in the shoot. Even when I'm working with somebody else's script, I work like that. So a lot of rewriting happens while you're in the shoot. What originally made you, because I know you're, you originally wrote a lot. I mean, I know you acted as well, but you're originally, I think, a writer turned director. And so what made you want to be a writer? And I have been writing since I was a kid. So I was writing when I was nine years old. I was writing when I was 10 years old. And I was writing three dark stuff when I was 19 years old. So that would scare a lot of people. Like my school magazine wouldn't publish what I wrote because I thought it was too dark. That's what I did. Really? Thank you. Yeah, I would like nobody, like I was so conscious of what I wrote because I felt things very strongly that I never showed it to anyone. I think somewhere, somewhere when I started watching a lot of cinema from the world over, mostly international cinema, not Indian cinema. When I started seeing a lot of European cinema, I started getting confident that what I wrote was actually good stuff. Because until then, I thought my writing was not very healthy. Well, that's actually a question I had for you because a common theme in your films and the shows that you, whether you're writing, directing or producing, there seems to be often this common theme about depravity in us as well as the nature of evil. But at the same time, one of the things that is so astonishing to me is your capacity to present characters that are never demonized. So is that intentional when you write or is that just a byproduct of your ability to create believable characters? No, I think that's somewhere that I see things as well because it's a very early on, like when I was growing up in a very small town in India and I was, we were primarily Hindi speaking and I never spoke a word of English and used to read a lot of Hindi literature. And that was the time that a lot of Russian literature was published in Hindi. So very early on in life, I was very influenced by Dastavsky, by Tolstoy. I read a whole lot of that literature in Hindi. I did not read it in English or any other language. I read it in Hindi. And also being a loner, you tend to think things and you tend to see things a certain way. And also that whole belief system that people are not born a certain way. You don't judge people for what they do. And I've always been curious about why somebody would do something so heinous as kill someone. What makes somebody seemingly so normal? Because I've seen this happen in this. Growing up in this very small town, I've known someone who later in life turned out to be someone who murdered somebody, not intentionally out of anger, across my house. I've seen things like somebody I probably played with. And it was somebody who showed us movies on VHS that were kind of forbidden because we were young kids and somebody who'd show us say Macanus Gold and it was forbidden because in Macanus Gold there's this one sequence where you see the breasts of the actress. As kids is nine, ten years old, you see that and you're like very wide eyed and in India you can't see that. So that we got kidnapped and we grew up much later and I was studying in a boarding school. When things like that happened around you, when I was growing up in Uttar Pradesh, in India, near the place, which is considered to be the current capital. So you see things and you start thinking because you don't tend to see people the way the world sees them. You want to get into the humanity, you want to see what makes them the way they are. And I've always been very bored by it. Very nice guys bore me. I can relate. We actually just watched your Raman Raghav 2.0. Phenomenal by the way. Which version do you see? There are two versions of the film. Oh really? Where did you see it? Where? We saw it on YouTube. That's the only place we could find it. There's a preferred version which is mostly all over Europe. You'll find a version that's in Germany or Spain and things. So what's the difference of those? Is it a director's cut? The Indian version was much more linear. Because in India they don't like to play with structure. Indian version was much more linear. It's a minor change but it changes a lot in the film. Indian version explains things a little bit more. Really? Now I want to find it. I'm talking about the version that played at the Canfield Festival. It's a more European version. Well, I want to find that now. We were talking about in it that it doesn't feel like in gangs and ugly and that you don't ever judge your characters and you also don't let the audience judge your characters. At one point, obviously Nawaz's character is a despicable person but at the end of it, Rick said that you wonder if he's almost an anti-hero kind of a little bit at the end. I was also wondering though, a lot of your films that you've not only written, directed but also produced Lunchbox, Udan, other ones like that are some of our favourites for one but they're also very digestible for Western audiences. Is that something you purposely write? Purposely think about? No, I don't like the unnecessary melodrama of Indian cinema. Even if I put that in my movies, my movies will be much bigger successes than they are. But the thing is, I just can't do it. I can't bring myself down to spoon feed or justify certain things because my education is very different. Mostly in the film industry, it's full of people who are born within the film industry. So it's just better. Nawaz, that's okay. So our film industry is mostly people who are born within the film industry. So they've grown up watching cinema that's already produced. The idea of the world comes from cinema. And my idea of the world comes from life. My idea of the world comes from a whole lot of other things. I did not grow up on Indian cinema as much as I grew up studying. I discovered cinema much too late in life. And when I found cinema, I got into cinema. And I used to read a lot because I spent most of my time in the library. So what happens is, I got my passport in say 19... I got a passport in 2004-5. I was 32 years old. I did not have a passport before that. So when you grow up in a small town in India, you travel the world through books. And you travel the world through cinema. And you get into people's heads. So it's not really deliberate in the sense that I am very aware of the kind of movies I'm making. And I am also aware of... It does not reach out to the core Indian audience, the cinema audience. Because it doesn't explain so much, it doesn't simplify so much. I like complex characters. And by creating complexity in movies, you also lose audience. So hence, I work backwards in the sense I work on very low budgets. I work on low budgets so that the budgets often force you to change your approach to cinema. Every time I got money to spend on films, I have not had that full freedom. I had to always cut out the complexity from the film. I have to simplify it. I have to cater more to the audience because you need a broad base audience. For a much more tighter audience, I can retain my complexities with the character. So like, for example, Saikur Raman or Raman Raghav, I know beforehand how much the film is going to work on box office. So how I work is I go to my producer and ask him, how much money will you give me if I do not give you a script and I don't tell you who is in it? Just to make a film. So then they give me a figure and I work backwards. So for example, Saikur Raman, I got a figure and I know that I cannot shoot more than 20 days. So I sit down and write the script to make it in a way that I can shoot it in 20 days. So that's why the chapters, because chapters help me jump. Interesting. So every chapter becomes like, I go into one location and I shoot one chunk. I go into another location and I shoot one chunk. So that's how I would design my film. So it is working backwards, but the point of the film was in the end, there's a song sequence in the pre-climax, when you see the burning of the Ravan and all the rituals. So what happened was at the time of the shoot, it was coinciding that the way India is, the political atmosphere of India is such right now at the moment where everybody is very insecure. So all the religions first time came out in the streets in numbers as a show of strength. All the festivals became a show of strength for religions, various religions. And that kind of became the commentary in the film. So all the visuals that you see of people are real visuals. I have not created that was happening on the street. We went there with the camera and shot it as it is. And that becomes the kind of a narrative in the climactic scene because the entire film was made only for the last sequence. The conversation between the two about what's evil and what is a perceived evil and what is an evil that we trust so much and we don't know it is evil. There's an evil that we're supposed to trust. Like for example, the police we're supposed to trust but in India we're afraid of the police. We don't trust the police, we're afraid of the police. I'm saying we're supposed to feel insecure but we're insecure. And I'm saying there's the summary and the whole conversation in the end was what the whole film was driving at. But I had to also do it in a way where it's like a genre film. In a genre piece you can be political, you can be complex, you can be so much more for the discerning eye, for people who understand it, it's fine. For people who don't understand it, they just see it as a serial killer film. Yeah. Sorry, Rick, can you turn your camera a little right there? Yeah, right there. Thank you, perfect. Thank you. Go ahead, Rick. Yeah, you've mentioned a few times about the working of the music in the films and I've found that oftentimes the score, it seems to have little musical symmetry. Like I bet if I listened to the score of Ugly or Raman Raghav and I showed those songs to people, they wouldn't even know they came from the same film. But when you see them as a whole, there's this congruency that it all seems like it's supposed to fit. And how closely do you work with your composers in that regard? I work a lot on music. Yeah, I think music is extremely important. Music became, because when I was writing my first movie, there was no music in it. It's a movie called Pange. And it was a movie about these four students based on a real story to kind of go on a crime screen because they want a good life. And to make that film, instead of four struggling students, I had to tell them into four members of a band. I made them into members of a band, because if you don't have songs, nobody wants to produce a movie. And I come from a school where I can't have an actor suddenly breaking into a song. With my first film, I didn't know how to put in a song, so I had to make them a member of a band. They were professionals in this. And I wanted to get to my story fast. So my first movie, if you see, it's very hard, but it's there on YouTube, but I don't think it has subtitled. I never released it, got banned in India. But my first film, first 25 minutes of the movie was just music, songs, songs, songs. When I said, you want songs, I'll give you songs, and then let me get to the story, and then the story. Yep. We see that in your films, sir. We see that in your films. Absolutely. There's your music. That's our relationship with music. Over a period, I think I figured out how to integrate music with my film. And because I love music so much, and my taste in music depends a lot on what I'm listening at the moment. So what I do is I work on music over a period of time, and I make it part of the narrative. Music always becomes part of the script and part of the narration. So if people are breaking into a song and dance, which is a rule that I've probably broken only once, they have to play the part of a singer. They have to play a professional singer or something. Otherwise, that rule I've broken only once in my movie. But other than that, they're only playing in the background score, and they are adding to the film what I cannot put in the script, mostly because of the reasons of censorship. So most of the songs, if you bring them down, kind of becomes political. Mostly, like, say, for example, Gangs of Asipur songs are extremely political. They're sexual and political. And for Indian movies, the key things that you cannot put in the movies is sex, sexuality, politics, and religion. The key things are a big no for Indian cinema. And those are my key preoccupations. I cannot make a film without those things. So I need to find ways to put that in, and songs often become the way to put it in. My songs are very political. We saw Sacred Games, which we love Sacred Games. And do you prefer that medium working with Netflix since you don't really have those constraints? I like working with Netflix. I've been doing a great time working with them because not just that. A lot of my movies that did not find, for example, Raman Randu, and for example, Ugly and The Girl in Yellow Boots, all these movies found a much, much bigger audience after they came on Netflix than they found in theater. So the amount of feedback and mails and the response I got for my movies after they came on Netflix, the movies that make people uncomfortable. So they became much more popular because of the OTT platforms. And they were on the release. I've always got great reviews and they played at festivals, but somehow there's always a lack of box office. There's a lack of number of people who seek at the time of release. So people generally discover my films later after they hear it. And by that time, it doesn't stay in cinemas in India because they're very limited cinemas. So with the advent of Netflix and Amazon, I found a much larger audience than I had when those films actually came on. I have a question for you because a lot, there's a variance of difference of opinion on this matter from filmmakers, even Martin Scorsese, who I know you know, would you like to do a film and have it go straight to a streaming service so you don't have those constraints? No, as a filmmaker, I would love to see my movie on screen. Yeah. But as an Indian filmmaker, we don't have that advantage, not because of Netflix wouldn't do it. Netflix is willing to do something like that. But the Indian theater owners would not play a film, even for a week if it's going on Netflix. Gotcha. So you can't do what they do. Right. You can't do a limited release there and then put it on streaming like we do in the States. No, you can do that in the US. You can do that in parts of Europe or UK. But you can't do that in India because the cinema, exhibitors won't do that. Exhibitors don't even give cinemas to do a premiere for movies that are going on Netflix. They do that for a web series. Like for example, Sacred Games, we premiered in a screen of cinemas, whereas the movies that go on Netflix, one couldn't find cinemas to screen them because there was a competition to them, even for a premiere. So that's a metaphor. Interesting. But you can do that outside India. Yeah. Yeah. You know, almost everything we've seen that you've done, whether you've written it, directed or produced it, they all are very digestible to Western audiences and what they expect in cinema. How much of that, we've often said that we think you are someone who could instantly become a household name here in the United States like other directors who don't come from America. I think most of our movies haven't... I've found a massive audience in Europe, mostly in Spain, Germany, France, Italy. But except Lunchbox, none of our friends have managed to have had a big through in the US or Canada. Like I've had a lot of movies that have played at the Toronto Film Festival. But Barik Lunchbox, none of our movies have had a kind of a breakthrough in the US. Gangster was, if you had a breakthrough on the online OTT platform. Because it was picked up by a distributor and it got a great Blu-ray release in US. But it found success on Netflix when they released it as a six-part series. Yeah. I think that's because, one, Americans don't like reading subtitles. Two, Americans have a very short attention span. And so releasing... I know Gangster Wasiper, which is probably my favorite... I think it's the best gangster film of all time. But the fact that it's five, five and a half hours long would immediately intimidate any American. That's the reason it didn't find a distribution. Yeah, which is unfortunate. Because it's so phenomenal. But do you have any aspirations to do any Hollywood films at all? Or not? No, I've been... Since Black Friday, 2005, I've had an agent in the US. And I've just been very resistant to it until two, three years ago. Until two, three years ago, I was very resistant to it because I'm very self-conscious of my language. So when I watch an American movie, I put the subtitles on, even for English language movies. Because I want to understand everything and I feel like I don't understand things. And then I was... I was on the jury in Sundance in 2013, I think. The Gangster Wasiper came out and played it Sundance. And... Park Chang-Wook had made a movie called Stoked with Nicole Kidman. And he's a very good friend. So I asked him, like, how did you manage to make a film in Hollywood? And he told me, very simply, he says, all you have to do is pretend you don't understand English. So when you pretend that you don't understand English, they leave you alone. But for me, I was like, by them, everybody knew that I spoke English. Good understanding. Had I met him much before, he says the moment they know you understand their language, everybody wants to tell you how to make a movie. So this is when they know, they have to talk to you through somebody, a mediator. You get a free hand at making a movie. So I've had... I've got so many filmmakers from across the world, their experiences in Hollywood has been very, very strange in the sense, like, I know Fatih Akin was trying to make a film and he had signed the contract with Focus Features and signing the contract. It went on for so long time and then he gave up and he came back and decided I don't want to work in Hollywood. I've had a whole lot of filmmakers who have had some very strange experiences and then they came to this phase in Hollywood, the phase where I was at, where they were picking up filmmakers from across the world who were playing movies at the festivals and they were all getting movies with, like, say, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger and Stallone and things and they were trying to make these packages with filmmakers from across the world. I didn't want to do movies like that. I did not want to do... I wanted to do more personal, intimate, smaller movies, which now I have started, now I'm a little more confident and in the sense of dealing with people, I have a great agent there and I have good people and we've been talking now to figure out something that I would like to do which is much more under the radar, quite smaller, more personal, and then something much out there and much louder. I would love that and I'm hoping that it's changing in Hollywood with the parasite winning the Oscar. Nathan, it's been changing for the last two years. Yeah. And the fact that Guillermo del Toro won... In your retube? Hania Hania in your retube. So we're hoping you can join that conversation of ones that have actually... There's a lot of good things happening. I'm seeing just the movies, for example, directed by an independent filmmaker. Bad Boys is these two Belgian filmmakers who came in. You have no history in Hollywood. So they are now actually looking at... They've understood that the hunger for a filmmaker to tell the story is much more from people who are coming from outside rather than play the Hollywood game. So I think it is changing. I've seen this change in perspective in the last two years. So most of the work that I'm doing right now is backed from outside only. It's not backed here as much. So you're out of shot. There, cool. Good. Thank you. Sorry. Go ahead. So I'm doing a lot of work for OTT platforms. Mostly my preferred platform is Netflix. I'm doing a lot of work at Netflix. But it's also... It's backed very strongly from there. So it's in a good space right now. Yeah. And would you say... And you could answer this question from a multiple of perspectives because you're an actor, you're a writer, you're a director, you're a producer. When we were speaking with... I know how you... But when we were speaking with Noazad Ansadiki about his approach to characters and if he would prefer to be in a character for a stretch of time like Sacred Games versus being able to do it for 20 days on a film, he said he loved, and it didn't surprise me, especially because he has a theater background, that he loved the process of being a character and extended them out of time like Sacred Games. Is that your preference as a creator? A series versus a film? Or it's too completely different? I like the idea of a series. I like to tell the whole story. Yeah. So many times my problem is that I need more time. I need more time to tell a story. I sometimes... Like some films like, say, Ugly and... Raman Raghav, they're fine. There's so many other movies, like the movie that I made Mukhabar. I probably would have made a much longer movie. Or Black Friday. Black Friday was probably... I would have made it like a gang of us. We actually shot and had a four and a half hour version. Really? Yeah, and then it got banned, and after that, by the time it got cleared, we lost a lot of the film in the lab. So what came out was a two hour 40 minute version, which was still very powerful, but we lost a lot of material. I like telling longer stories. Yeah. Yeah, it was... Sacred Games is one of our favorite series. I loved the ending of Sacred Games. I did want to ask you one question, though. I know you didn't direct the second season, but you were obviously heavily involved. No, I did the second season as well. You directed? Yeah, me and Leeraj came on. We directed the second season. I directed all the... Sorry. There was one part that I wanted to know, because I hated her so much. At the end, when they're trying to figure out the code, spoilers for anybody who hasn't seen it, go away. This woman comes up, who's supposed to be a tech expert. She just inputs a random pattern two or three times, and I wanted to shoot her in the face so much. Can you explain the logic behind what she did there? Because... I can't explain that because that was... not my chunk. We don't even read each other's scripts. Gotcha. Because we have a boss sitting on top of our head. Gotcha. We have a right to corona. Got it. I just wanted to know if you knew, because we reacted to that in a live reaction. People saw my reaction, they found it multiple times. Just shoot her in the face, Sartaj. I hated her so much. Sometimes it works because there's always this character that you hate so much and it irritates you because it's just killing time when there's a race against time. Those characters work very well because they pull you in much more because you start getting personally involved. I love the ending though. I love that you didn't answer it because you left it open for interpretation. I love that. I wanted to have a question about you've worked with Nawaz a lot and you almost gave him his biggest break, obviously. He talked about when you casted him in Gangs of Wasiper that somebody came up and said, who's your lead? I think you pointed to Nawaz and they were like, oh, this will never work. Obviously, he doesn't look like a hero. When did you know that Nawaz was as good as he is? In my opinion, he's one of the greatest actors I've ever seen. Nawaz is not just a villain, he's an incredible screen presence. For me, Nawaz's first role, I cast him because I was a casting director at that time as well as a writer. It was a movie called Shool which I wrote and I was casting and Nawaz was in dire need of money. And I said there's nothing good for you when he said I'll just come and work because I just need my lunch money. So he did a one-scene role in that movie called Shool. And after that we worked again on Black Friday and Black Friday is where I discovered him because Black Friday was just a good actor for me and he's just one of the many good actors who were on the set. And while I was shooting with him, the very crucial scene has seen that a whole lot of people love and my assistant who's also been my co-writer standing next to me, this woman who was from the same acting school as Nawaz was, but she wanted to be more in direction. And while Nawaz was performing she was kind of talking to herself and she was gushing over him and she said look at his eyes, look at his eyes they're so beautiful. I was like listening to her and that's it was almost like a prompt. She prompted me and I looked at Nawaz very differently. I was suddenly like oh, there's a woman talking about Nawaz, how beautiful his eyes were. And then I'll try to look at Nawaz from a perspective of say a woman or from a perspective of a filmmaker. I never saw him that deeply before that day. And I realized the man is somebody else on camera. He holds the camera because if you see him off screen if you see him on the street, you will not notice him. He will come and sit quietly next to you, you would not know that he's coming sit and he's the main actor in the show. He's so he's like you know his properties of copper he's malleable in that style he can shape you up any which way and he's like that in his persona is so huge and so much more larger so what really helps is because he does not have a persona off camera that it doesn't restrict me into cast him in a manner that if you see most of the actors, very good actors like you see Pashino is such a great actor Diniro is such a great actor but you know it's Pashino and Diniro whether they're on screen or off screen. With Nawaz that's not the case but Nawaz becomes the character on screen but off screen he disappears so it kind of helps me I can think of him in various ways and he'll come in and he'll totally surrender he just get into this by doing Raman Draga he fell ill twice he got into it so badly he got dengu, he was in a hospital and while in the hospital he was only just constantly blabbering lines from Saikuram from Raman Draga as if he was literally delivering the character and he was on a high fever and his wife called me and she said what have you done to him and he's just like talking non-stop lines from a movie and I got scared and he was really affected by it he becomes like that he likes to live there, he likes to stay there because he actually prefers that world and he steps into that world so when he's bringing a character he steps into that world can you put your camera back I'm sorry I keep missing you, go ahead thank you in Raman Draga one of the things that was so astonishing about Nawaz was he was obviously playing someone who was sociopathic but it wasn't just in the dialogue and it wasn't just in what he was doing literally as if I could see there was a psychosis in the inner monologue that that monologue I wrote that monologue I wrote back in 1993 really it is from it is from a play that I it's the first piece of writing that I did when I came to the city in 1993 I wrote a play and that started with this monologue which was about this person who was killed somebody on the street and the police picks him up and they're talking to him and he's talking about why he killed that person and how I wrote it back in 1993 so when I was about to make this movie Raman Draga I actually wanted to make a biopic but my movie Bombay Alwet didn't work it was a big disaster and everybody pulled the plug on Raman Draga so we had the material and Vasan Balar who was a writer on Raman Draga he had done a lot of work on it so I took his material and I tried to I made the film into a contemporary film and it became a political statement so that his monologue piece I called a friend of mine who had my plays that I wrote in 1993 he had all my writing from then and he's the theater in Delhi and I asked him and he sent me screenshots of the play and from the screenshots I rewrote the monologue then monologue piece was written in I was 21 years old when I wrote that really that's impressive that was such a phenomenal scene what you did with it and what obviously Nawaz did he's so natural in what he does I did want to talk about the acting your process with one casting and acting but there was another scene that I want to talk about as well in ugly I'm sure it's one of the most famous scenes in it in the police station the police station yeah that's what I want to talk about I heard it was supposed to be one minute and then you just let them go and they were kind of improvising and it came out to be a 14 minute scene that was the first day of the shoot oh really jeez so you must have felt good improvising in the sense also I did not give my script to the actors I would give them scenes on the day of the shoot and I did not want anyone to know what I was doing and what I did was I gave them all different instructions I told the father that you think nobody's trying to understand you so you're constantly trying to explain things in the way it happened and you're very sincere so every time you're asked a question you try to sincerely answer it you have to be overzealous and very sincere I told the actor who's playing his friend that your friend is an idiot he doesn't understand how to handle the police he doesn't know how to handle the world you're a more practical person you're a street smart person so you have to keep cutting in between and try to handle things your way and I told the cop you don't trust them at all you think they've done it so you want them to keep repeating what they're doing that's a very irrelevant question till you see they kind of crack up and the scene went on non-stop for 14 minutes because nobody would stop and it stopped only because I couldn't control my laughter and I fell off the chair well yeah I was I was dying I was dying I have one take I'm like the first very first take stop for 14 and a half minutes which we didn't cut when I started laughing and you can hear my laughter I still have that somewhere after that we start to just borrow from that one take that lends to our question about the way you work with actors and you select your actors because what you just said is very revealing about how you direct your actors because I know a lot of actors would be scared to come on set and not have a script not know a full objective they want to create a backstory they need to know what their why and you just yeah all you needed to do with them but what's beautiful is all you needed to do in that scene was give everybody a very simple objective and they trusted you to just take that I don't work with actors till I form a trust with them or they form a trust with me so I spend a lot of time like even when I'm working with actors I have worked with them in a smaller role where they have seen me how I work then I give them a little bigger role before I put them in the center and when I'm working with absolute newcomers for a first film where I know I need to work with them then they wait for the film is 3 years before they come on board after they come on board when they come on board 3 years they hang out on the set they assist, they watch the process before I start to work watch how you work because if my actors don't trust me I cannot make the film every time I found I had an actor who didn't give me the trust and the faith things have gone wrong just the way you described the way you directed that scene my first thought was man those actors had to trust you they had to and they gave me a lot of trust give me a lot of trust this Mukhabar's film that I made recently I told him he's the same guy who plays the best friend in Ugly he plays the centerpiece he plays the lead in Mukhabar's Mukhabar's is the boxer it's the brawler so I told him I cannot make a film with you in the lead role because nobody will give me the money so if you have to make the film in a smaller budget that means you have to save money on choreographing the boxing so for that you have to become a boxer if you become a boxer I will save the ring with you and I will save money and I can make the film and I sent him off and he went away for a year he actually became a boxer and he's fighting the Asian champion in the film and all the boxing scenes boxing happened wow I love that that's beautiful yeah that's fantastic so in terms of your casting process we're both actors so that's why we're asking a lot of acting questions yeah a lot of your films especially some of the smaller characters it seems that you sometimes just go out on the street and pick somebody who looks like the character that you're trying to portray so what is your process with the casting I pick out actors like that I find an interesting actor I know what role I want for him and which film I want to use him but I do it much before the film I normally do it in advance I always find my actors more than here in advance and I put that in their head and I get them to prepare like many a times this actor I worked with in a short film who plays a perpendicular in Gangs of Wasipur and I told him I said you want a role in the film I have a role for you but you need to learn how to play with a blade in your mouth so your only audition process is that I trust everything about you except can you play with a blade in your mouth without it looking like you're making an effort or I don't need to do camera tricks and he literally went and learned how to play with a blade in his mouth and he got the role that really is because obviously you can already see an actor's talent before you cast them so you already know that but to give an actor that much time to prepare is a much better in my opinion casting process and it shows in your films because your films have some of the most realistic acting we've seen I think almost 100 we've only been doing this for a little over a year now we've seen over 100 films and your films have realistic acting that we've seen out of India and so that to your credit I believe actors are like and they give that time that's also the reason why I've worked with most times new actors or actors who give me that kind of a time actors and music because it's very important I don't know how to create music I mean people who give me time I can't work with a music director who is so busy that I'm not in his pride in this because I don't have very big budgets so I end up working with a newcomer or I end up working with people who have that kind of relationship who will still prioritize me even if I have less money for them than what the mainstream industry is giving them I cannot work with someone who does not prioritize me so within our limited budgets I have to find people who prioritize me we saw a thing on Netflix it was a creative Indians the thing that you did with them it was a very happy guinea pig with your composers and I love that you let artists be artists and since that's one of the things I love about you you kind of just let the artists do their thing and then you kind of shape it to what you need it to be but I think that's why your scores are so unique and creative and very different because sometimes you'll just have gangs of wasp are going on and it's just I love it because it's so different that's a lot of fare to Sneha Khandwalke my working process not just with the music it's mostly with everybody is the same I do not tell them what to do I give them very basic instructions information most of the times they don't get a script until much later but I know what I'm going to make so I take them into the world and I only tell them what not to do I only keep the power of saying no with me but I do not tell them what to do including my costume designer my production designer and my camera person and I let them what they want to do the most I don't tell my camera man this is the film I want to do this is how I want to shoot it I ask him what's the new camera you want to try what's the new thing you want to try this is our conversation and everybody has this thing that I've been dying to do and I genuinely believe that I've done my best work when somebody has trusted me and let me be so that's how I work with my people and I know when you trust them and you let them be they don't just have the sense of responsibility that they like so much they also feel empowered to want to give you so much more and they also want to do something that they've been dying to do but nobody lets them do because everybody tells them exactly what to do so even with the music director like every time I deal with music directors they say every person comes to us and say we want a song like this we want a song like that blockbuster song they say you're the only one who comes and tells me what do you want to do then you make me hear a sound that's awesome we work on the sound first what is the kind of a sound we are working towards in the movie and then we start working on music and songs and I don't have few songs ready I don't get into the script at all interesting sometimes like the most famous dialogue from Gang Sao Vasipur about Kaike Lunga comes because of the song it wasn't the song did not come from the dialogue in the script the dialogue in the script came from the song hmm wow so those are the things and that's why the the script was very flexible the script is written there and then suddenly Sneha recorded the song and the song was in gibberish the music was in gibberish and it went like kangainunga kangainunga and that's how it sounded like that and suddenly while listening to her gibberish I said you know Kaike Lunga is such an extraordinary expression hmm such an extraordinary expression and then we found that word and then the song was built around Kaike Lunga and then to incorporate that in the film I rewrote that entire sequence I love that so it's a kind of a process that is that everybody is a kind of a collaborator on it so I can borrow from everywhere and I keep adapting to it and keep changing it and everybody feels like they want to give it their best because they also get the time they want to do it yeah because we've always said film is a collaborative art form obviously and you really take that to heart and it shows and I think that's why your work shows that it's so so good because my screening and my audition happens before people come on board so like I'll spend all my time before locking my production designer before locking my costume person before locking my team and all my time with them knowing whether I can work with them or not or whether they'll understand what my process or not it's done there after they come on board we're all equals and then they have their own kind of a contribution and they become their one bosses yeah how important do you think it is because obviously you said you don't like acting but you have acted and you know acting and it obviously informs your directing do you think it's important for directors to understand actors and acting like for me it has helped me a lot because my entire process of casting or handling actors is informed by my experience in acting so while I was acting on stage and I was very proud after on stage because I know that I was very good and at that time I like most people I also had ambitions of acting and I enjoyed the fact that I was very good and I was getting so much attention and I got movies very early on when I was very young I was 20 early 20s and I got some movies to act in and I was terrible in them I was like the shittiest actor you've seen on stage so I could not stand myself I could not watch it and I did 4 films 5 films and I just as soon as I wouldn't talk about it I wouldn't tell people I was in those movies and it was so bad and that's what taught me how not to handle actors because I realized it was because not because I didn't know how to act it was because my director does not know how to work with actors so my entire learning of how to deal with actors comes from knowing what not to do with actors yeah well put that's very true I actually have a question it's not so much in your films at all but the I know what he's going to ask you I've asked this of another director and Nawaz we've seen quite a few and the one common thread I see with a lot of acting in Indian cinema is that the white actors are so terrible the foreign white actor it's almost comically bad how they are and it's not all the acting like it could be like an Irfan Khan film and he's amazing but then a foreign actor comes in and he kind of just shits all over the place and so I was wondering if you knew why that is it's a very simple thing they very rarely cast white actors in the movie they just cast a white man in a role many a times because it's also the equation of rupee versus the dollar or rupee versus the pound so they have the minimum wage of an actor say outside India is what you pay a very successful actor here in order to save money so you want a good talent and you respect the talent so either you pay good money for it or you spend time scrounging through cinema theaters and amongst actors and find a new raw talent who's very good they don't want to spend time and they don't want to spend money so they end up working with very bad white actors make sense well you want a rapid fire thank you so much for your time we have a couple like almost fast quick questions for you here rapid fire that we just wanted to ask you to end it off here so first off coffee or chai coffee black coffee black coffee well done sir i'm with you do you have a favorite Hollywood film oh i have too many i like too many movies i like too many movies i like one or two one or two that you like you give me a decade i can name favorite filmmakers yeah favorite favorite film maker then one of your favorite film makers one of my favorite filmmakers is Minus Corsese yes Minus Corsese that's obvious i will not talk about Scorsese i will not talk about Coppola among the my favorite film of last 20 years i can say that of last 20 years from Hollywood they will be blood and my favorite film worldwide memories of murder i haven't seen it but i know i think it's beyond pariside so memories of murder i got it right now and my favorite my other film that i like so much is leg the right one in i haven't seen that one it says memories of murder it's a kind of a horror maybe the guy who made tinker totailers will just buy his first film oh yeah and they will be blood is my favorite Hollywood film in last 20 years is he your favorite Hollywood actor i saw it at the dome in LA only two filmmakers once upon a time in Hollywood and they will be blood oh that's awesome i love the dome favorite Hollywood actor yeah of course yeah go ahead rick and otherwise james cagney wow i think james cagney is the precursor of all later great actors because everybody from a jack nipples into pachino to dinner i think they kind of come from james cagney what is one film you think every person specifically every film a writer should watch specifically like a writer the best writer you should watch this if you want to see great screenwriting oh great successful screenwriting though the film did not succeed so much no but for me i will talk about my process when i was learning writing a lot of learning i had from james m came and the adaptation of his films my learning was i read double indemnity then saw the adaptation of it i read poshman drinks twice then i saw all the versions of it including the chinese version of it then there was purple rain there is a whole lot of james m came adaptation and one of the greatest adaptations according to me was LA confidential because i read the entire LA quartet james selroy when i went to LA i would go and sit in the restaurant i would sit and write in scripts and i got matchboxes from there nice but you see LA confidential LA confidential is such a big book but how intelligently it's been written because they took out a lot of material from the book away and still made a concise film and they created that role of tamasi they created it was created by the script writer it was not in the original book never in the book it was never in the book so that it was probably the most intelligent screenplay adaptation i have seen ever and my learning of screenwriting is also from reading the books then reading the screenplay then watching the film so that's how i thought myself maybe and these are exactly the books and the films and your favorite alcoholic beverage i love whiskey and i love woodburn and lf kilkoman and i am right now having custom egos that's good yeah i'm a whiskey man i love all alcohol but the whiskey is my thing i love whiskey number one and my tequila or my scale number two well thank you so much for allowing us to sit down and have a conversation with you it's a big honor for us you're easily one of my favorite just directors playing not just indian directors and not really but i was sent a link for you reviewed it and i thought you caught on to every single nuance of it which i was so happy to see that i would love to talk to you and i have to see more of what you've been doing we were just so happy that you catch on to every single tiny little thing on it so one feels very good because a lot of complexity people don't tend to catch so phenomenal it was all our honor we just did the r2.0 just yesterday i'll see that i'll go check it out thank you so much for sitting down with us it's a huge honor if you ever need white actors you know who to call but yeah go ahead rick where are you guys based los angeles i keep coming to them my daughter studies at chaplain if you're ever here we would love to sit down and talk i'll do it when i'm there yeah please do thank you so much have a good one man thank you