‘Aamir’ was an unusual script and screenplay to be reckoned with. Who would have thought, that with a treatment so distant, yet palpable and a face not so familiar would make a dent? “But it did, didn’t it,” Rajkumar Gupta, debutante director of this common man’s story was convinced his film will be a success. After lugging around the script, banging his head with producers and makers, knocking on moneyed doors, Gupta finally got UTV on his side. But why take Rajeev Khandelwal? “Because a star becomes larger than the character.”

But in Aamir, the Mumbai city was one of the characters - crowded, jammed, old, tired, blocks of buildings staring down...”and a camera movement following from a measured distance.” Only a protégé of Anurag Kashyap would traverse the cinematic territory like that! Assistant director to Kashyap on ‘Black Friday’ and ‘No Smoking’, Gupta feels that a director needs to be sure and sincere. “He has to know everything, he has to believe in the integrity of the story,” saying this Gupta cancels the thought of being genre specific. Although he stems from a league of bold and experimental filmmakers, he feels that typecasting in one role stunts the growth. “Being a master of all genres, now that’s the true test of a filmmaker.”

In Zirakpur with Mitul Dikshit at Dikshant International School, where he interacted with children, Rajkumar’s journey from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand to the studios of Mumbai has been an interesting one. “The love for cinema was not a one-film affair. It was slow and steady, till I knew this was my calling.”