(From top) Ankur Khanna and Soha Ali Khan; Roopa Ganguly and Victor Banerjee; Shayan Munshi and Zeenat Aman; (below) Kiera Chaplin in Chaurahen

You must be happy that your debut film Chaurahen is finally releasing (on March 16), after five years...

Yes, I am very happy. It was made in 2007. Any filmmaker would be depressed if their film doesn’t release. So much hard work, so much tears have gone into it. Whether it’s good or bad is for the audience to judge. I know everybody will not love my film and I don’t expect that. However, I wanted people to see it back in 2007. This film has the quality of universality. My actors look the same as they did five years back. So it worked for me, you know, and I am glad. I made it on a very low budget.... I feel it has to release because it’s a beautiful story.

Why was the film stuck for so long?

I couldn’t find a distributor. It’s an English film. Back in 2007, very few niche films were finding a distributor. Only big films released. It was a very different time. I made the film ahead of its time, I guess. But Chaurahen travelled to as many as 11 film festivals across the world and the feedback was very good. So I thought let it be and I got involved with Aisha. But the trend changed and films like Dhobi Ghat and Delhi Belly were accepted. Then PVR started this network called Director’s Rare, where they are promoting independent directors. I had almost given up and then through a friend I came to know about PVR and then voila, it happened!

Tell us about Chaurahen?

There are four stories running parallelly. Thematically, they are all connected but they are individual stories. The theme is love, loss and death.

Soha Ali Khan and Ankur Khanna play a couple living in Bombay and how the relationship affects them is one story.

Another story stars Victor Banerjee, who is cheating on his wife Roopa Ganguly and having an adulterous relationship with Kiera Chaplin, only to discover that Kiera is his daughter’s age. It’s set in Calcutta.

The third story, set in Kochi, revolves around Karthik Kumar, Arundhati Nag and Suchitra Pillai, where Karthik plays a homosexual who wants to find out what he wants in life... Chaurahen is a film about relationships, about how we start questioning our own selves and go back to the roads we chose to take.

There’s also a surprise package with Zeenat Aman and Shayan Munshi. I don’t want to reveal much. They play two strangers who meet in a bar. I chose the subject because of its melancholiness and I chose an author like Nirmal Verma and adapted his short stories for the film.

Chaurahen is an English film, why did you choose a Hindi title?

It’s an English film with spurts of Malayali, Bengali and Hindi. I wanted to use Chaurahen and not ‘Crossroads’ because lots of movies had this title. I remember going to the American embassy once where I said I had made a film called Crossroads, and the lady said, ‘Oh with Britney Spears in it!’ And I was like, no, that’s not the one! So I decided to go with a Hindi title.

You have an ensemble cast and you shot the film in three cities. Didn’t that push up the budget?

Actually, a lot of my actors were very supportive. There were times when we didn’t know how we were going to shoot the next day. Will we have enough film in our can? But everything worked out and we kept going. It was tough. People like Resul Pookutty (sound designer) and Gulzar (he has written the lyrics for one song) have contributed too.

How have you dealt with homosexuality in the film?

As a natural thing. The character who is a homosexual is just a normal person. But he has his own way of dealing with his pain and his parents’ acceptance. Karthik Kumar played it so well. I told him that I didn’t want it to be sensational, because I have so many friends who are homosexuals. What I tried to say is that everybody has their own problem and how they solve it is what the film is all about. It doesn’t matter whether they are homosexual or straight or whether they are having an adulterous relationship. Everybody has their secrets behind closed doors.

How did Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter, Kiera, come on board?

She read the script and liked it. She had seen my short films Badger and Moment, which won the SVA Student Academy Award in New York in 1999. And when I went to her through a friend, she said, ‘Oh I want to work in your film!’ She was excited about shooting in India.

Did the box-office response to Aisha match your expectations?

I made a film and I made it with all my heart. I went and pitched my film (Aisha) to Mr Anil Kapoor and this question should be geared towards him. He would be the right person to say whether he is affected, because I made the film to the best of my ability and I am happy.

Any plans to make a Bengali film?

Yes, very much. I am half-Bengali, you see. My mother is a Bengali and my dad is a Gujarati. My next project is a Bengali film. I have a script ready and I am pitching it around. It’s a beautiful story about a family.