Strange meetings: Venkatesh Chavan with Nana Patekar in The Pool; (top) Chavan with costars Ayesha Mohan and Jhangir Badshah; (above) Chris Smith

Jhangir Badshah worked in a tea stall in Panjim. Venkatesh Chavan collected scrap. Neither ever imagined they’d become movie stars, rubbing shoulders with Nana Patekar. And it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Bobby.

Several years ago American film-maker Chris Smith went to Goa to help some friends who were working on a film recreating Raj Kapoor’s paean to teen love with street kids. Smith had never been to India before and long after I’m Bobby had done the festival rounds the experience stuck with him.

Smith went on to make his own mark in films. His documentary American Movie — about a hapless film-maker trying to make a horror film — won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival in 1999. Home Movie explored unusual homes — an alligator wrangler on a houseboat, a family living in an abandoned missile silo. American Job was about jobs, crappy ones.

But nothing in his filmography suggested this documentary-maker from Wisconsin would travel to Panjim to make a feature film in Hindi. But he went back there in 2006 and shot for 65 days over five months. The Pool — which stars the two child actors, Chavan and Badshah (who were then 17 and 11 respectively), along with Patekar — is now winding its way across theatres in the United States.

The film is based on a short story by Randy Russell set in Iowa. Smith says he started wondering what it would be like to set Russell’s story in Goa instead. “Panjim really stuck with me,” he says. “It’s such a different world and at the same time there is this universality.”

In the end, he says, all that remains of the original story is “someone coming across a pool and becoming obsessed with it and trying to meet the people who own it.”

Chavan plays that “someone” — an 18-year-old room boy in a hotel — and Nana Patekar and Ayesha Mohan are the mysterious father and daughter who own the house with the pool. Chavan whiles his time away on a mango tree which gives him the perfect view of the shimmering pool. But he can’t understand why no one ever seems to use it. He inveigles himself into the lives of homeowners, by working in the garden, and taking the moody lonely daughter out on excursions all over Goa. “It’s really a film about someone setting out with one goal and then something else happens,” says Smith.

Underneath its placid surface, the film is swirling with undercurrents of class differences, the juxtaposition of affluence and poverty in a booming India.

The New York Times has compared the movie to a Satyajit Ray film. And like that master found out while directing Pather Panchali, it’s tough to make child actors appear natural in front of the camera. “They are talented and gifted but I had to teach them not to act and be comfortable with pauses,” laughs Smith. “I remember Jhangir would get stiff when he walked in front of the camera.”

Jhangir Badshah, who worked in a tea shop whose owner was Smith’s location manager, is an 11-year-old tea shop boy and Chavan’s best friend in the film. Smith knew Chavan from his ‘I’m Bobby days’, for the boy had a role in the film. But there were problems. Chavan, to begin with, was busy with the family business of recycling scrap. To make things more complicated, neither spoke English and Hindi wasn’t their first language either. Smith rehearsed scenes on the set through a translator, relying on his gut to feel if the performance was working.

There were other complications too. One actor went to Mumbai to buy karate uniforms and never returned. The actress earlier chosen for the daughter’s role decided she couldn’t take the time off from school. The actor playing the father got busy with a television serial. To top it, the perfect pool was nowhere to be found. And shooting needed to finish before the monsoons set in.

Just as he was about to give up on his search, his production manager said he’d found the perfect house with the perfect pool. “I was sceptical. I had heard that before,” says Smith. “But I walked in and knew it was the place.”

After he lost the actor playing the father, Smith chanced upon an interview with Patekar in a newspaper. He didn’t know his films but liked the way he looked and sounded in the interview. Director Anurag Kashyap helped make the introductions. Patekar said he was too busy to do the film but he did watch the 45 minutes of footage Smith had brought with him. “Then he was quiet,” remembers Smith. “Then he said, ‘This reminds me of what we used to do before we got corrupted. I will turn myself over to you.’”

Smith admits it was sometimes a challenge for Patekar to work with non-professional actors. “Sometimes Venkatesh would forget his lines or go off on a tangent but Nana would bring him back. He is by far one of the most talented actors I’ve worked with.” Then he adds with a chuckle, “But I think Venkatesh holds his own.”

Smith hopes the film will open in India soon. It has already been screened in Goa where Chavan and Badshah watched their celluloid debut. “They both cried at the end,” says Smith. “I think they didn’t fully understand the film while we were making it since it was done out of sequence.”

But however it does at the box office, The Pool has already changed lives. Tea shop boy Badshah has used the money he earned from the film to join school. As Smith says, sometimes you set out with one goal and something else happens.