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I work with a lot of movie stars.

If you work with big stars, then they become the lead actors. It's not that I don't want to do films with big stars, but I would rather do the films where I get the title roles.

We have filmmakers who make films with some kind of responsibility and take cinema seriously like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Prakash Jha. But now these people also take stars... Without stars they cannot work.

I could never work in that kind of commercial environment where the stars have a lot to say, where the producers kind of push you around and tell you who to cast and who not to cast. I'm just not interested in that at all.

To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them.

I've worked with Hollywood stars, but the reason most of the Hollywood stars I've worked with are Hollywood stars is that they're excellent actors, so I've been very lucky.

It's mostly directors whom I get starstruck around.

Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.

It's nice that established and emerging stars agree to appear in ambitious low-budget films. Such pro-bono work gives the movie a higher profile and the actors a potentially more distinguished resume.