Well, it wasn't something that I thought about -- not doing medicine. You know, all my family is in medicine, but it was a slow thing, realising that the thing I was doing for fun as a little kid, making movies with my dad's camera, is something that you can go to school for. It wasn't something that -- I mean, now you can go to school for film school and it seems more normal, but back then it wasn't -- it isn't something you could learn to do as a career. And I heard about this school in New York, that it's a film school, and I told my parents, 'Hey, I want to go to film school.'

•But a camera, a movie camera at the age of eight? How did that happen?

I guess that's weird enough in itself. But you know at the time when I was a kid, we had Spielberg (Steven) making ET.

• You're 1970 born, I think.

1970. So ET was in 1982, and Jaws was 1975. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was huge for me, in 1983. Spielberg was doing his thing right when I was a little kid. And when I saw those movies I said, 'You know, that's what I want to do!'

• And how did your parents figure it? Because in an Indian household, for a kid who's eight, it's the parents who figure things?

... contd.