Characterisation is more important to me than the script. A decent story and extraordinary characters can do wonders for a film, but you cannot do it the other way around.
Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.
I really took it in-house. The Constantine character has a kind of flesh-and-blood practical look at things that would seem, other people would use the word, occult or spiritual. But here, demons are real. So for me it was more taking it from the film itself. I didn't really need to go outside the piece itself to inform me because the perspective on it, what the character does, was provided by the script.
All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script, and it's very linear. There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script ,and then you cut that, and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.
After I read the story of 'Dangal' and before the film released, I called director Nitish Tiwari asking him if he had any good script. He told me to wait for some time. So we had three-four sittings, and this film, 'Chhichhore,' came to him. The film did not have superstars, but I felt that this is the script that needs to be told.
'Quantum of Solace' was a bit of a different circumstance than a lot of my other films because you're stepping into a franchise, and also in that particular film, we're dealing with a script from the writer's strike, which was difficult to handle because there was never time to really develop a finished script.
'180' is a romantic film, but I don't think it can be classified as a fluffy love story. It is a wonderful story with a script that is layered and more complex than the normal ones.
I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.
But what else can I do, other than to plead with you like this? Other than to write down my story, our story, to show you that what you've done . . . to make you realize that what you did wasn't fair, wasn't right.
I wasn't searching for a common denominator - I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.
The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.
Women should not only be doing action on-screen but should be a part of every other aspect of filmmaking.
I don't have, you know, an 'overcoming addiction' story, other than the guitar itself, and I haven't overcome that. I don't have a jail time, you know, story, or any arrests.
There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.
The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director.
I read the script first to get the perspective on the whole story, the writing, and how the character I'm auditioning for is talked about by other people or relates to other people; from there, I go into the sides.