Question: What are your influences, particularly since some of your films have political themes?

Sudhir Mishra: I have a very complicated background. I grew up in a university campus, my father was a film society founder in Lucknow and I grew up watching all sorts of films when I was 4, sitting in his lap, films that my mother didn't want me to see. My father was a very ecletic sort of guy. He never had the view that a certain kind of film was good or bad. So I got to see Dara Singh, Charlie Chaplin, some Czech films, French films and a lot of Hollywood classics together.

I guess the feeling of wanting to be in films got ingrained there and later there's been an influence of Marxism, the Student Movement, of growing up in a university with all sorts of people - Palestinians, Israelis, Malaysians, Africans etc. I have a political background thanks to my family and I have known mainstream politics enough to get a little put off by it. I grew up in a small town called Sagar. My family was in Lucknow, then came to Delhi and then to Bombay. I have been in Bombay for more than 25 years and am as "Mumbaikar" as anyone else.

Question: Most people know you as the director of Hazaron Khwaishen Aisi and Khoya Khoya Chand. Very few people know that you started off as a scriptwriter for Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. Whoever I spoke to was very surprised when I told them this. You started your directorial career with Yeh Woh Manzil Toh Nahin. Can you tell us something about your early films, since we don't get to see them these days?

Sudhir Mishra: My first film as an assistant was Sazaa-e-Maut which was made in 1981. It was Vinod Chopra's first film, starring Naseeruddin Shah and a film much ahead of its time and rather good. Then I met Kundan Shah who was, at that time, working on Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. When you write scripts, you often stare at the wall and I think his family thought he wasn't doing much. So he started writing in my house. I was 23 at the time when Kundan asked me to work with him and must have done something for him to have given me credit for the script of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron.

But ultimately it's Kundan's film. It was wonderful working on that film with a great group of actors, people like Satish Kaushik and Ranjit Kapoor writing dialogue. It was a learning school for me and I am very fond of that film because for the first time, I realized that I could be a filmmaker and that this community and process was something that I loved. It was a fantastic time when 30 people were sitting together, not shooting. People like Naseer entered my life and taught me about film acting. I met Saeed Mirza there and he asked me to join him as an assistant on "Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho" and I became its scriptwriter. So there was this great family that I had found at that time, including those that were not directly involved like Ketan Mehta and Shekhar Kapur who are still good friends.

I made my first film "Yeh Woh Manzil Toh Nahin" with a lot of help from all these people. In those days, these kind of films were not released very widely but the Doordarshan premiere was very important and was seen by a lot of people. It was quite a cult film of its time and a lot of people still tell me that it is my best film. It is about 3 old men who go back to the town they studied in where there's an agitation going on in the university and that agitation reminds them of their past and it is intercut with their revolution, much like Rang De Basanti. I cut between the student movements happening in two different times. The 3 old men had betrayed their fellow revolutionaries in their time and they are now faced with an activism of a different kind. The last line of the film became pretty famous and is still quoted in north India. When they say - "What's the difference? The person who is a revolutionary now and who was a revolutionary then. Both died", Habib Tanvir who's the lead actor of the film says - "Koshish Toh Ki" (At least we tried).

Question: Most of the people who have seen Dharavi were swept away by the first 5 minutes of the film. Could you tell us how you came up with that scene?

Sudhir Mishra: I used to live in Sion which is in Bombay (Mumbai now). A lot of people who live in Dharavi say they live in Sion because there's a stigma attached to that. I used to walk around a lot in those areas and those days, we used to drink too much (laughs). We went into those places and "knew" people, not for research purposes because I think you make a film well when you know your subject well and not because you decide to make a film and then do research. You make films on things you have already researched in life. So it all comes from that.

I remember the image of a camel running on a Dharavi street and suddenly the camel is shot and it falls in slow motion. A lot of people like that shot. I think the problem of a migrant is that, there's a line in Dharavi which says, "Yeh reth ka jaanwar idhar samandar ke paas kaiko marne aaya hai" (Why has this desert animal come to die by the sea?). So it was this idea of people who bring camels to the beaches of Mumbai and just leave them to die. These camels used to wander around sometimes in the dark of the night, a still camel that no one could see . Once I remember my autorickshaw banging into one and it was really tragic to see a noble animal treated like that. Whoever's responsible for stopping camels from coming into the city deserves congratulations from me.

Dharavi was the problem of a migrant. I was a migrant. A migrant treates the city more roughly than the original inhabitant. So Shabana portrayed a woman for whom Mumbai was her "gaon" (village). She has nowhere to go but a migrant has nowhere to go either. The place that he has left has changed because home is a place in time, it's your memory. So what does a person in Dharavi, a taxidriver who has lost his roots,do? He's influenced by Hindi films and Madhuri Dixit agreed to spoof herself which was very kind of her. Amongst all my films, I still like Dharavi the best.