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If studios don't get their money back, we don't have any movies. So it is important that films are successful, and I am fully supportive of that because I'm not just a director, I'm also not stupid. I've been in this business long enough and, to a certain extent, I'm a businessman; I know the importance of that.

Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.

I come from an everyday middle class family in India. The film industry reached us only through our television sets and cinema halls.

My production company wasn't doing well, so we were not producing films. Over a period of time, we have realized that we are going to produce our own films and make cinema that we like. We've got so much in-house talent, and my kids are going to be coming, so we all decided that we are going to be in films and cinema.

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

That's easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.

If you really want to be competitive in today's market you have to be in movies that make money.

It's truly gratifying to see my films reach beyond a familiar public, to get a chance to move new audiences. It's nuts. It's extraordinary.