Shiney Ahuja is perhaps the only lead actor you have repeated.
Shiney sort of cast himself. We had just made a film together and his face came to me while I was writing the character of Zaffar. Shiney is a wonderful and nuanced actor. If you see the end of Hazaron Khawishen Aisi, where he is cowering, screaming and begging for mercy in front of the two cops, who beat the hell out of him, there’s so much of truth in it that I don’t think there is any actor in India today, who can do that scene. It’s a challenge. Naturally, with a person who you can take that far, you form a kind of relationship and if there’s a part for him in my films, I will always cast him. But my next film Tera Kya Hoga Johnny is with Neil Mukesh; so it’s not as if Shiney is there in all my films.

What is your next film Tera Kya Hoga Johnny about?
In a Mumbai trying to be Shanghai, who gives a damn about a boy selling coffee on its roads. Johnny is a typical Mumbai character, a boy-man who performs a very important function of selling coffee every night and then there are three people who wonder what’s going to become of him. Johnny too wonders what’s going to become of them because if they make it, he will make it. One of these three characters is a boy called Pervez, who’s in Mumbai after his family was affected by the Gujarat riots and is involved with a married woman who happens to be a policeman’s wife. Then there’s Preeti played by Soha, who doesn’t want anything but is getting everything courtesy the magic of Mumbai. Karan Nath, a corporate whiz kid going down the hill due to drugs, plays her boyfriend and there’s a hijra played by Saurabh Shukla who’s like a mother figure to Johnny. It’s the story of this wild underground and what happens when Johnny wants to get out of the city.

... contd.