So I spent time hanging out and drinking with people behind the film. The producer was an ex-convict, the actress was his mistress and the casting agent was a pimp who later got arrested for shooting a porn video in Karjat.

Basically, a great bunch of people who introduced me to everyone in the C-grade industry at the time. But they were too scared to talk on camera because there was so much overlap with the underworld and prostitution.

So the documentary I was trying to make never happened. The stories I heard and the people I met became the basis of the script for " Miss Lovely".

Is it true that you are uncomfortable working with Bollywood stars? Not uncomfortable, just not really interested. How did you decide on the cast of your debut feature film, especially Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Femina Miss India Earth 2005 Niharika Singh? I wanted people who felt very similar to the characters in the script.

I didn't really want them to act too much but just be. I didn't care about what they had done in the past.

So, in a sense, I'm the opposite of every other director. I want people that nobody knows.

I didn't know who Nawaz was - I just saw his screen test and was like "this guy is Sonu". Nobody wanted to give him a lead role for some strange reason.

It's only later that I realized that he might actually be one of the best actors we have in this country. It's great that he is finally getting his due.

Similarly, Niharika Singh had only done some modelling and an unreleased Himesh Reshammiya film. But her screen test was magnificent and that was that.

It really was the same with Anil George, who plays the elder brother, Vicky Duggal. How did you negotiate the difficulty of not turning your movie into sleaze even while choosing the C-grade film industry as your subject? You don't really kill people when you make a war film.

So I guess, it's the same here. Apart from the usual high of having "ML" being screened at the Un Certain Regard section, what else does this selection translate into for you both emotionally and professionally? I worked on this film for almost five years, so it's nice that others share some of the same love I have for it.

"Miss Lovely" also gets away from the typical cliches expected of Indian cinema - that either it's a song-and-dance show or it's a story of a struggling rural schoolboy. And yet it's very confident of its Indianness as a film and I'm proud of that.

I think it shows that we have a more diverse cinematic vocabulary in this country. The only official Indian entry at Cannes Film Festival last year -"Chatrak" - hasn't yet released in India.

When are you planning the Indian release of your movie? It has quite a lot of "difficult" material, to put it politely. So it needs to get past censors first.

For me, it is almost more important to show the film in India than anywhere else but knowing the way our distributors operate and their singular interest in stars, I am sort of aware of that reality. Let's hope for the best.

Despite your documentary, "John & Jane", having had a world premiere at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival followed by a European premiere at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival and winning a National Film Award in 2007, why is it that you have avoided the limelight? I don't really enjoy doing press, and I'm not too interested in Bollywood. So, there isn't much point.

"John & Jane" was supposedly rejected at a festival in Mumbai before he finally went on to win a National Award. How did you manage to reconcile with the initial setback of rejection? I first sent it to the Mumbai International Film Festival.

It was rejected, and I was really disappointed. But then the film was accepted to the Toronto Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival and won a European Media Award.

I kind of realised that my film wasn't all that bad. This is the disappointing truth: If the film hadn't hit the international festival circuit, if it hadn't been picked up by international distributors, I don't think it would have stood a chance in India.

Things are a bit better now, though. Your films short film, "The Dust", was made by reworking home movies shot by your grandfather in the 1950s.

Why did you choose such a format? I like the idea of recycling film, reusing it in new and different ways. "Miss Lovely" also has material that was shot in the 1980s, including horror films and sleaze films and I've reused those as part of the story.

Film has so much history embedded in it - we shouldn't ignore that. I love seeing that classic establishing shot of Marine Drive shot from where Cafe Naaz used to be on Malabar Hill.

The classic "Queen's Necklace" shot - that is the quintessential Bombay/Mumbai image and which features in films starting from the 1920s going all the way to today. That shot has so much history.

It's amazing. Your work displays experimentation in terms of structures, often blurring the lines between documentary and fiction.

Who else among your peers in India would you say is also working with form in their movies? There are some filmmakers experimenting with different kinds of formal structures in India, but not too many feature filmmakers do that anymore. We had a history of people like Mani Kaul and G.

Aravindan, but you don't see that now. Even typical Bollywood melodrama of the 1970s had some really weird and amazing flashback/ flashforward structures.

I love stuff like double and triple roles. We need to do more of that! How are you adjusting to this new-found media glare? It's easy because I just avoid most of it.

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