It used to bug me that I couldn't even afford to take my family for a proper holiday. I didn't have any professional knowledge, and getting a photographer's job in a magazine was out of the question. So, armed with a Pentax K1000, I started going to various maidans of Mumbai, looking for subjects.

For me, a director is a director immaterial of the gender. At the end of the day, the audience is only interested in watching a good film.

To find one's calling is perhaps not the easiest thing in the world, but probably the most important.

Nothing was planned in my career. I just went with the flow and took everything that came to me. Selling potato chips was obvious, as it was a family business. When friends suggested I should try theatre, I gave it a shot. Then I did a lot of advertisements, and then movies happened.

I was emancipated at 15. I went to school and had a full-time job and apartment, and ever since, I've been on my own, parenting myself.

I am a simple guy, most of the time I am with my family, my wife and my son. I like to be with them and they make me happy.

I'm the seventh child of George and Leona Douglas, and I don't ever remember a time when my father didn't work two jobs. When my mother was going to the grocery, or going to Mass, or trying to take care of seven kids in a run-down farmhouse.

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.