Johnny Depp: Cut for the role

Mumbai, May 15: The first time he was tortured at Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison, his face was turned upwards. The next time he was tortured with his face down.

“I was lying in a pool of blood. I could see it because I was lying face down. I thought I was going to drown in my own blood,” Gregory David Roberts says, smiling. “Then I thought it was wonderful material! Only if I survived.”

Roberts will be turning that “wonderful material” into screenplay over the next 10 days. Ensconced in Mumbai, the city that made him what he is today ? the city he fell in love with, “like with a woman”.

This is the Australian scholar-turned-robber-turned-author’s second visit to Mumbai after Shantaram, his novel on the city and his own bizarre life, was published last year. The book is to be made into a film by Warner Bros, with Johnny Depp in the lead.

Initially, Russell Crowe had been considered, but Roberts said no. Why?

“Both are great guys, both very articulate and well-read,” Roberts tells his spellbound audience, which includes members of the Page Three set: actor Kittu Gidwani, theatre personality Dolly Thakore, actor Heeba Shah, Kal Ho Na Ho director Nikhil Advani and rising star Ayesha Takia.

“But there are elements of Johnny’s character that are best-suited to India. The actor has to love India the way I do ? the slightest amount of condescension would kill it.”

He denies he glorifies the slum life in Mumbai where he had landed up as a fugitive from Australia. He set up a clinic at a Colaba slum but also worked as a forger and smuggler for the mafia, apart from doing bit roles in films.

“It is wrong to think of slums as only places of misery. There’s a great sense of liberation there,” he says.

And once he finishes his screenplay, he will probably make straight for his earlier hangouts ? the joints in the seedy parts of Colaba, the drug dens, perhaps the prisons?

It’s in prisons, here and elsewhere, that the burly 53-year-old man, with his hair tied in a long ponytail like a WWF wrestler, has had his most poignant experiences.