 How are you doing in this whole lockdown thing? Well, you know, I'm writer, you know, so for the writer, lockdown is the same life, you know, you just sit in a room and you look out the window. So that's what I've been doing, you know, I'm very happy to be home and this is the place where I grew up and this is the longest I've stayed here 21 years with my mother and unfortunately it's it's really perfect here, you know, because you know, there's a great it's a great space for writers to write a lot of animals sauntering in and around and you know, it's the old a Sam style house. I don't know if you're aware of a Sam style house. These are these bungalows, the British built a British design when they came when they were in a Sam, the only thing I miss here, my wife and kid, they're stuck in Delhi, but thanks to technology and we're calling them every day. So I'm so sorry, that's awful. Glad you're glad you keep it up with your spirit. So the as a writer, I'm sure you're just getting a lot done. It does it does being in isolation basically help or is it a hindrance as a writer? I'm getting so many calls to do projects now, which I would never got in the pre covid world because, you know, all these studios are paying salaries to the executives that really justify their salaries. So they're calling all the writers and listen, we need to develop content, you know, so I'm like, yeah, so I'm swamped with work actually, which is a good thing, you know, good. That's awesome. Yeah, a little bit of a lighting, you know, so the writers are kind of happy with the lockdown situation. Yeah. And I have your film, which I think you saw our review, but we think it's such a brilliant film. So hats off to you for a million different reasons. That that film was so, so, so good. How how has your life changed or has it since that film came out? Well, you know, you know, not when I used to pitch your film ideas earlier, people would just think I'm nuts, you know, but one because these concepts, they don't work. You know how I used to work in Bombay in the cinema industry in Bollywood, so to speak, and you know, I was finding no takers for my ideas, you know, so I decided to go independent and things started happening. So I get taken a little bit more seriously these days. That's a good thing, you know, even not like I'm rolling in money, but at least, you know, people listen to you now, you know, and for a writer, I think that's more important than money. There's somebody to listen to, you know, absolutely. Yeah, that was you mentioned something that we were going to ask you, so you basically created a love story that centers around cannibalism. Did you? But what was it like having to pitch that? Well, because, you know, the idea was never to pitch it as a film about cannibalism, that being a cannibalism, you know, was a very provocative group. So and, you know, I wanted to provoke people a little bit. You know, I think the second part of the film is mostly about addiction and how people deal with it. Yeah. And how people manipulate to love them to get their fix. So it could have, you know, drugs or it could have been alcohol. But because I was a very provocative group, I used cannibalism. Yeah. And that was that was brilliant to because it was like, I think I said in the review, said it's it's almost cannibalism is almost the secondary part of the film. It's mostly a love story and about addiction, like you said. And the fact that cannibalism is almost like I mean, it's it's the crazy part of the film. But it's almost like a side story of what what is actually going on in the film, which is a testament to your to your brilliance. But this was actually the first a film that we'd ever seen. And I feel even in India, this has been a lot of people's first film from a song. And because when we did the review, we wanted people to not watch a review if they hadn't seen it because obviously you want people to see this. And a lot of people had told us that they went and tried to find it and then watched it and then came back and saw the review. How do you feel about this being like, does it put any pressure on you that your film is a lot of people's first introduction to a song? It's a I don't know. Again, I guess, you know, the proper word to use here is humbling, you know, but everybody uses when, you know, when people start watching a film. It's also for me, you know, it's it's idea validation, you know, because, you know, to get validated for your ideas, no matter how weird they are, it's always very satisfying filmmaker writer, you know. So and to see people, you know, not from a Sam, you know, people from Kerala, from, you know, Delhi or Bengal, you know, just just understanding what this film is about is really, you know, it's very validating experience. Have you seen people outside of India with the same response? Pretty much, yeah, we premiered in Tribeca. So, you know, an American audience, I thought would not get much of the cultural, you know, context that because touch is such an important part of Western culture, you know. But, you know, it is plausible that India to like somebody for a long time without even having one single touch. So I thought, you know, things might get lost in the cultural context, but they got it, you know, in the sense the whole essence of the film is a lot of two people, you know, who like each other, but cannot do anything about it. And that's pretty much universal, you know. So so, yeah, America was quite good. I didn't travel much after that with the film, but it has been playing in festivals in Europe and Asia. And we have been getting great responses in the market. The feed is full of wonderful feedback from people. That's great. Yeah, there's so many metaphors and allegories within it that transcend even the cultural things that are clearly not only things we could sense and new for the limited understanding we have for that region of India, but the larger pictures of, you know, I thought about this when we were reviewing it, the things as simple as you are what you eat and everybody has skeletons in their closet and some of them still have meat on their bones. What was the inspiration for the idea? Did you first have the love story and then the idea of them taking pieces of themselves became a part of that? What was the process in writing it? I think this idea just came to me, you know, over a period of three or four months of observation through a little bit of studying. But like the idea got triggered when I saw two people eating meat in the food court in the mall in the pre-COVID world when malls are open and people are visiting food courts. And you know, both of them are so involved and I think they were eating cave chicken of all things. And, you know, they were so involved in that meat they were not even looking at each other. So I think this point, you know, so I don't know, maybe this was filed in my subconscious and then I stumbled across this very strange sexual kink on the internet called Borarephilia, which is about, you know, fantasizing, getting ingested by a lover and getting on the ad, basically, you know, so there are a lot of these forums where people share artwork or stories, you know, about Borarephilia. So sort of all these things, you know, and then the whole nature of sin, punishment, who is it, you know, should we hate the sinner? Because at some level, you know, we are all capable of sinning. So these kind of things, you know, sort of came together and I just threw it out at my producer, Shyam Bura one day, one rainy day, you know, while we were marketing my first film in a Sam and he completely pounced on it, you know, and he said, let's do this, well, like really? So that's how it began. I bet he's glad he did now. The, we first saw the trailer for this a few months ago and it was presented by Anirad Kashia. So I was wondering how he saw this film and what that relationship was like. So I knew Anirad through Common Friends and, you know, I had once briefly met him, you know, when he was working on Gangs of Wassepur, you know, in one of the, you know, one of these cafes in Varsova where all these trucklers hang out in Bollywood. So that was the only sort of interaction that happened before this. But he heard about the film and he wanted to see it. So, you know, I went over to his home, his flat, and he took me to his den, which is basically wall to wall filled with DVDs of, you know, all kinds of films, you know, it's like a, I don't know, it's a DVD library of a unique kind of a DVD library. So we saw the film there and, you know, after the screening ended, the first thing he said was that, wow, somebody's finally done this in India. So I figured, you know, so that's how it began. And he was aware of the film. And after six, seven months when we were trying to release the film, we're not getting money to release the film. And he came and lent his name to the project. It's not like he funded the release, but he lent his name, which was enough to, you know, for us to attract a small little bit of money we needed to have a theatrical release. So it was great to get him to support us. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, there's many, I mean, we made a comparison when after we watched it immediately because of the prominence of Parasite having won the Oscar this year here in America. And we actually, in all sincerity, we said this in the review, we loved Parasite. We think Parasite is a wonderful film. We are very happy that it won Best Picture for a lot of reasons. But if someone were to ask me, and I think Corbin feels the same way, of the two films, which of them do you prefer? We actually prefer your film. And I think we're hearing a lot of conversation about you being considered, for lack of a better term, the Bong Joon Ho of Assam or of India. And how does that feel? Do you consider that to be a compliment? Do you not want to be compared to anybody? I've actually, I've not seen Parasite, but I will at some point soon. But I loved this first film, The Host, because I'm a feature-feature guy. I love genre cinema since I was a little boy. I've been watching. So The Host for me was a very, very remarkable film. That should have gone to the Oscars, I thought. But I've also been compared to many people, Christopher Nolan and I don't know. So many names in Assam. Christopher Nolan of Assam, which is not a big deal. Like how Mr. Big used to be big in Japan in us. But it's okay, these are just, you're only as good as your last film. So I don't get to me because you got to stay desperate. How do you like working on small budget films? Do you like that? Do you like the challenges that it brings that makes you have to be creative? I'm sure you'd love to have the biggest budget you could, but how do you like working on the small budgets as comparison to having a larger budget? I haven't really had a chance to work on a big budget film. I hope to have Fingers crossed next year. I hope to do a big budget film in Bombay. But what I think is, I think the budget, the strip is the budget. When I'm writing the script, I consider the budget as an important thing. If I feel that this scene requires three of us in France, then I will try to write the scene like that. Reality hits you when you start budgeting the script and realize that obviously, you cannot get more than a crore in funding for your films. So whatever it is, you have to compromise on the scale of the film. Because as Rima asked another filmmaker from Sam, whose film actually went to the Oscars from India, she has proven that even 10, 15 lakh rupees also you can make a very, very good film. So budget is obviously important, but what I see most writers do is they abandon ideas because they think that they are never able to get this much money to make this film. But idea should be grand because it doesn't cost any money to think grand. So only when you're executing it that you need the money that you can compromise a little bit. And I have also learned over the course of two films that what you want to see with a large scene with 300 actors can also be set in a small room with one actor also. If you just apply yourself and think. So I guess that means that you tend to become more creative because you try to get more bang for the box of the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the creative process, the last film obviously, when you were writing this, did you have particular actors in mind, especially for the leads that you were like, oh, this is exactly who I want to have play this? Or did you find them afterwards and you found the match to who you envisioned as you wrote? That was true for the male lead, Orgody, the guy who played Sumon's character. But this character, like Lima and me, we've been talking for a while about doing a film and because she's also a dancer. So we were thinking of whether to do a short film on asymus dance. So I thought when the story came to me and I started developing it, I thought maybe this would be good to have her because if you look at love stories, they mostly work if you have new faces, new actors you've not seen before. So that for audiences to connect with the character than the actor. It's so playing this character. So I thought, anyway, I'm looking for new faces. So let me just try and approach her and see if she can do this film. I didn't think she would do it because she comes from a conservative classical dance and she's also a dentist by profession. But she just loved the idea and that's how we found her. So in the middle of writing the script, we fixed the female lead. The male lead causes a lot of headache. That was just, I think, three weeks before we were supposed to start shooting, we found the guy. And that's how it happened. We auditioned a lot of, we saw a lot of boys to play this role. But there was never any consensus in the crew that this person is correct. If I had liked someone, the producer would say it won't work. So finally, when we saw him, everybody was in agreement that yes, we found the guy. So that's how it began. That must have been a huge relief being three weeks away from production. We didn't know what to do, getting the dates off for the shoot. But that's how things happened. And what's your relationship like in terms of directing actors? Are you very hands-on? Do you like a lot of rehearsal? Or do you like to just, I think, Ang Lee, he's very hands-off. He doesn't really interfere a lot. So where do you follow as a director in dealing with actors? Because they can be touchy sometimes. I actually, when I started making films, I had been, when I started doing films, I was not, you know, it's always to say that, you know, actors are nothing but talking props. But, you know, after working in my first film, I worked with two legendary actors from Sam Adel Hussain and Seema Biswas. So, you know, through the way they practice their craft, I realized it's such an interesting art form. So, and what we did for my first film is we did a 10-day workshop with all the actors, where, you know, we went through the motion, not only understanding what acting is, and, you know, and so I learned a lot from that first experience, you know, that workshop. What was happening in Armaces, you were getting these two lead actors who had never, ever acted in front of the camera before. So, you know, so it was even more important for them to go through a very rigorous workshop, you know, where we not only discussed the characters, that came very late in the workshop. Most of the workshop was just about what is acting, you know. And, you know, what might take away at work, that, you know, acting is not about showing what you're feeling, but you just feel it. And then whatever, you know, it's natural when you come out on your face. So that is my one instruction to both the actors, just don't act, you know, just feel it. That is the best advice you could ever give an actor, don't act, that's positive. That's funny. What, I don't know if you've experienced this, this is just a random throw-off question. Have you noticed, like I have, that all the white actors in India are usually terrible? And that's a few different directors this. And I was wondering if you had an opinion as to why that is. Oh, because we just pick up the first white guy we see on the screen in a second. That's been the universal answer pretty much. It's like, we're not gonna pay full screen actors and build scale to some American actor and fly them in for a not even supporting role. So yeah. Anyways. How did you do it? But they don't want them because they want to save some money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Well, if you ever need white actors, call us up, man. They'll be cheaper than shoot you guys. I was gonna say, when did you know what inspired you to be both a writer and a director? I would assume writing came first, but I'd love to know what made you want to do both of them. I started, of course, my career thinking that I'd become a script writer and I'll lose scripts only. But I realized, you know, in my body would stand if you were to call it, you know, it was five years I struggled in Bombay. And nobody takes writers seriously. So it's better to, you know, just become a writer director. It's not like I was not trained in filmmaking. I did an image program in filmmaking in the diversity of reading in the UK. And it was not, of course, not a vocational course like it was in some other film school, but, you know, I had an aesthetic understanding of cinema. So I knew I could direct if I had to. So that's how it began, basically. I just started, you know, just instead of just writing, just becoming a writer and director. And suddenly you start moving faster in your career. Yeah. I also want to say, you have a great voice. This is the first time I've ever hearing your voice. Your voice is similar to that of Christopher Lee. I don't know if you've ever heard that. Yeah. Baritone. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Thank you. But I wanted to ask what directors, either India or Hollywood or wherever in the world, inspired you most to be a filmmaker? I don't know, you know, because I don't have this. This question is asked to me a lot these days, but I don't really have a ready answer because, you know, I like films by a wide range of people, not because they are those people who made it, but because of what they made. So I read mostly to the art that other than the artist have done. So I like films by Kronenberg. You know, I like some of Ray's films, but not all of them. So, you know, so it's like that, you know, I see a piece of art and I get influenced or I get, you know, I file it away, you know, as an influence. But mostly it has been genre filmmakers like John Carpenter, you know, early, early Middle East people have had, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, I understand you were a big fan and probably still are of both Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, is that right? Of course, yes. I think it's my good one. Yeah, so what are some of your favorite, like your favorite favorite? I've read a lot of Stephen King novels. So what are some of your favorite Stephen King works? Well, when I was 16, I read it for the first time. And I've booked several times over the years as I grew older. And each time I find something new in that big fat novel. But for a long time, my favorite Stephen King book was Misery. You know, this whole, you know, it was such a, you know, every time he comes up with a plot, it is so interesting. And you can't put down the book, you know. That is what I love about it, he writes. So I'm a big fan of Misery. Most of his books, even Pujo, you know. I think Pujo is great, you know. But I'm shining, of course. How can I forget shining, you know? It's just, I think it's the only book that I was, it scared me, I couldn't carry on reading. I'm with you, for me it's the shining. I was, you know, I had seen the Kubrick film first and then I read the book after and I was blown away at how good the book was. Yeah, it's such an interesting study of a man descending into madness, you know. And I find madness very interesting, you know. So I love that book and I think the film didn't even touch 10% of the potential of the book. I agree. The, you said you like creature films, is that what you said? Creature features. Are you a fan of Guillermo? Of who? Guillermo del Toro. Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, you know, I've seen Panz Le Brint and I've seen Shape of Water. So yeah, and I like Panz Le Brint a lot, you know. This is, that film is not too much of a movie. It's such an important document of its times, you know. And I've seen very little of a cinema coming out of that era of France in fascist Spain, you know. So I love Panz Le Brint a lot, yeah. Yeah, such a great, great film. Favorite directors of yours out of America? I know you named some in India, but who are your favorite ones that you've, I know you said you don't have a specific one, but like in terms of just American genre, who are some that you like a lot? I would have to say, you know, the director's work I always look forward to is John Carpenter, you know. Since I was very young, I was watching, you know, his film, you know, his films. And I really don't know, you know. I really cannot name filmmakers right now, you know, from any culture. I was a huge fan of Rehidio Nakata who made the ring, you know, the ring ring in Japanese. Yeah. So Takashi Mike's work also really liked out of Japan, you know, so yeah, I mean, there's no really one filmmaker that I can say is my favorite or... Yeah. So what projects do you have coming that you're excited about or you may want us to know about? Do you say you're coming to Bollywood? Yeah, there's something, of course, it's too early for me to talk about the project yet, but it's definitely, you know, it's a film I wrote in my struggling days in Bombay. And I finally made a say on it last year. So hopefully that film will take off next year and that is consuming most of my time. I also function as a strip writer, so I'm getting a lot of web series work, you know, screenplay work to do. I'm planning another Asami's film. I'm trying to, you know, do an adaptation of, not an adaptation, but a story inspired by the metamorphosis. So it's very challenging. So let's hope it. That's awesome. Well, we're looking forward to anything you put out, man. That's gonna be awesome to have you more exposure. And a lot of people have asked, I don't know if you know this, where they can watch the film. Do you know the best place that they can watch it, Ruan? Cause we don't want people to watch it via pirate, pirated content. We want to make sure the creators get their due. And so do you know where specifically people can watch it? Currently it's just movietains.com in India. Yeah. We, I don't know why, but we're trying. We're trying to put it out on big up platforms, especially internationally. We have a sales agent who's working towards that. Right now it's just movietains and I'm, and I know it's not possible for everybody to watch it on movie scenes because it's not a really well-known OTT. But if you just visit the website and there, the website you'll find a lot of interesting content from India, a lot of interesting filming. Like, you know, Salan Satharan from Kerala, you know, his films are on that platform. A lot of films from Northeast are on that platform. So it's, you know, it's not, you know, people who support independence and Emma is not just supporting the films or the filmmakers, but also the platforms which are exclusively devoted to showing independent cinema. And movie scenes is one of them. It's a clearing website. So I would urge everyone to watch it. Yeah. That's where, that's where I heard that it was stationed. That's where I've been telling people to go. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't another place that people could see it. But I want to thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure talking to you, man. You're supremely talented and we can't wait to see what's coming next from you. Rick, I don't know. I'd love to talk to you, guys. Yeah, I'd love to be talking with you. I'm really thankful. We were introduced to you because of our subscribers who we affectionately refer to as the stupid family and our stupid babies. But it has been a joy to, Corbin and I were completely ignorant to all of the artistry coming out of India a year and a half ago. And because of the journey we've been able to take, we've not only been introduced to the expansiveness of the beauty of the artistry, but some of our favorite things we've encountered are what we refer and you did to as the independent films that are coming out of the regional areas of India. And we want so much for people to celebrate the kind of film that you make. So we are anxiously looking forward to anything that you're doing and please feel free to contact us. Let us know when you have something coming so we can promote it for you. Definitely. I'll definitely do that. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for your time. You have a great night.