Weren’t you snowed down with acting offers after your successful debut in Kaminey?
There have been offers, but since I have not taken any of them up, it is pointless to discuss those. What brought me to Kaminey was that Vishal was offering something very out-of-the-box, but you get quickly stereotyped after the successful run of an art form. I would like to restrict myself from getting stereotyped. I would not want to be slotted as anything. If anything, I am Amole Gupte - a father, a painter, a cook and a cinema student.

What is your association with Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI)?
MAMI is so very special for me because I saw the Korean film A Single Spark and Vera Chytilová’s Traps there. It pushed me towards cinema again 11 years ago when I was living the life of a painter. I was a student of acting in the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and thereafter I was an honourable squatter at FTII for 12 long years during which I was a part of 120 student films in the campus. I would act, write, do music and art - handle any department. There I watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker over 30 times. For those 12 years I swam in cinema.

So as much as I want to be at MFF for every minute, I feel like a truant boy skipping my workshops with children from municipal schools.

There is the cinema club you have been running for over a year now. Your students even made a film, didn’t they?
The cinema club with underprivileged kids continues. Their first film, Aansoo Bane Moti, is going to be screened at Ryan Childrens’ Film Festival being held in Mumbai from November 6 to 12 alongside Megan Mylan’s Smile Pinki. I am also the jury member on it. Other children’s films in the festival are made by adults. These are children from some Mumbai municipal schools and I have been conducting workshops with them under the aegis of NGO Aseema - since the last one-and-a-half years. I teach in order to learn from my class. I am learning much more in the class than them.

Whose idea was the Young Critics concept? Were you involved in selecting 21 participants in this session?
It is MAMI’s idea, I joined the initiative. No, I did not select the young critics simply because I am not judgemental at all. I just did a session with them and the German critic Daniel Kothen conducted the long play session. I am not a critic but a student of cinema. That’s what I communicated to the 21 young critics - to never let the student in them die. I advised them not to watch a film with the overbearing responsibility of writing a critique on it - but to first experience it. If somebody makes tea for you it should be your pleasure to experience it, but if you act like a tea- taster right from the beginning you will end up as an employee of a tea company.

What are the essential directives for a critic?
The essential is that organism called the film! What’s it’s life, as a critic - you have to decode that. It cannot be just divided into plot points, resolution etc. A film may be a boutique piece sans any formula like Taare Zameen Par. In Bollywood parlance it wasn’t a formula film at all - the lead actor was a child, the component came in at the interval and there were no standard formulaic components yet it penetrated the viewers’ psyche deeply.

What must a good critic do for riyaaz, watch films?
In order to be a critic of cinema, which is a compound of all the arts, you have to seep in all arts simultaneously to increase your resource bank, only then will you be able to take lutf (fun) out of the ada (performance). Otherwise any international filmmaker - like Tarkovsky -may be so alien to you. It is so important to grab it through the ducts of history, music, painting and theatre to be on the same page as the filmmaker who might have given his heart to his film. You must realise that you are mature enough to analyse a cinema before commiting yourself to the paper or keyboard.

Can critics mar the box-office outcome of a film?
The money spent on films has increased four- folds over and so there is such a great fear of losing money. Cinema today is about losing or making money, the street art is now lost. The marketing aggressiveness of the producer is so intolerant. Anything written against their film is treated like a slur, if sombody learned criticised me, I would take a cue and try to grow. The one-sided view of the moneybags is so intolerant of the counterview that it scares me!

Are you a first-day, first- show person?
I used to be a Friday matinee guy - I have watched 79 films within 60 days before joining the tenth standard. I would watch films all over Mumbai - Naaz, Swastik, Nandi, Majestic, Imperial and Ram and Shyam theatres. Those were the times of re-runs. I watched Teesri Manzil 11 times within three years from my seventh to the tenth standard. It was such a masterpiece byNasir Hussain and Vijay Anand, it was a thriller that even Hitchcock would have loved to be a part of it. Jewel Thief is another of my favourites.

But now in this age of DVDs, my interest is world cinema - what is the emerging content, form and syntax of cinema. I relish Hindi cinema when it comes in the form of sensible films. In the house - on a day I can watch 3-4 films and have my own film festival. I borrow films from the library and friends - I am not a hoarder.

If you were to take a pick this year, which films would you recommend?
Kaminey, if I were to latch myself out of it. I have watched it nine times over because I have fallen in love with the sound design and the background score and songs. The other film that blew my head off was the Marathi opus, Harishchandrachi Factory. I wept and laughed through the film, Nandu Madhav’s portrayal in the film took my wind out. I have seen it four times already. I discover new moments each time.

Have you finished the casting for your film Sapno Ko Ginte Ginte?
No I haven’t cast the star yet for Sapno Ko Ginte Ginte, I would rather go easy on it becasue my workshops with the children are giving me tremendous satisfaction. I am mapping the workshops into visual outputs and I am hoping something nice comes out of it. These children have invested so much time and faith in me.