I guess people feel that if you're working with good directors and are known in the Hindi film industry, then you won't work in South films. However, I believe that films have no boundaries of language, religion, or cast. If it's a good script and a good director, I can do a film in Spanish as well.
I don't care about names attached to the script. That doesn't matter to me. All things being equal, I would like to work with a good script with a good director, and the part I play is of less important than those two factors.
There are definitely reasons to do certain things, but I like to stick to good director, good actor, good script.
An actor is only a part of the film, not the whole, and very often, he is moulded by the director. That is why a good director can make so much difference to a film.
In the movies, you want a good story and characters that are honest, but you are also looking for a good director who can lead the ship. That's how we look at business. Everybody has a great idea for a start-up, and so do their relatives, and they tell me, 'You gotta build it.' I say, 'I have to believe in it.'
And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you've got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime.
After all these years, I'm starting to learn what a good director does, and I know what a good one does with actors: help us navigate finer instincts, help us when we're wrong, encourage us when things are great.
Matching character and actor is what a good director does.
To be a good director, you have to spend a lot of time on actual sets, but today, there's a lot of people who spend a lot of time in dark rooms writing a script, and they'll go in and tell the story to some suit at a studio who says, 'Okay, this is great, let's go.' But that doesn't necessarily mean you know what to do once you're on set.
Any good director, and I've worked with a few that I would call very good, they know how to disarm any anxieties very quickly.
