Director

I like hip-hop personally. It is a genre I am very attached to and have been listening to all my life. But I have always engaged with foreign artistes, never with mainstream Indian hip-hop rap space.

Some of my characters are drawn from people I know whereas others are an amalgamation of people or one specific person. Sometimes a character is simply fictional. It is always a mix.

My biggest challenge was when I had my first panic attack at 27. It's not something you can ignore, you can't sit around and get sucked into a rabbit hole.

Freedom is a sentiment associated with the youth. It is rebellion. It is what you feel at that age, and it is very important.

I write my films with Reema Kagti, and I think all the characters that I have written, somewhere or the other, reflect my thoughts, ideology and morality.

So, I have those spurts where I get completely mad because I have those stories to tell but if I don't have, I'm happy to kick back also.

When you colonise someone's dream, that's the worst thing you can do.

As a filmmaker when you show your film to anybody, you want it to be liked. You want the reviews to be positive. After watching your film, you want people to feel good.

As cinema is a reflection of the world around us, with more women coming into the mainstream business, more women narratives will grab the limelight.

What a good actor brings to a script is something, sometimes, even directors can't imagine. The director should always have the last say though.

I think actors get paid a lot and technicians don't get paid enough and I think that it should change because a good film, which is like a complete package, needs every single member of that team. I think we need to pay them more.

Who will you replace Dibakar Banerjee with? There isn't another one.

But disco is the remedy for ghosts.

I love music, but can't hold a note in a bucket. I can't sing, can't play an instrument.

I was an executive producer. I've done a lot of jobs and I think each one helps you get closer to what you want as a director. It also helps you - when you work with different filmmakers - to absorb, to adapt, to know what to watch out for, to know pitfalls.

But if you can empathise with a character and if you can emotionally resonate with that character and understand their emotional journey, I think you are home.

See I think we are nervous about every movie before it's release, irrespective of who has directed the movie.

I think there is nothing more important in forming a human being than your family. It is how you have been brought up and been taken care of that eventually is how you will deal with and treat the world.

I am always pleasantly surprised by the criticism because I learn from it and sometimes shocked by it.

I have to have a story I really want to tell, and then it makes sense to put things out there. So if you see, 2018 was again crazy for me. I did 'Lust Stories', 'Made in Heaven' and 'Gully Boy'.