White Feather film's Sanjay Gupta on 'Shootout At Lokhandwala'

How did the idea of 'Shootout At Lokhandwala' come about?

To begin with originally, it is what I wanted to direct. I was supposed to direct this film in place of 'Zinda', my previous film. And then 'Zinda' came along and I went with that and this film went into cold storage for about a year until I met Apoorva Lakhia. We were tossing ideas back and forth as to what we want to do and I gave him the idea for the film and said if you want to do this film, be my guest and that's how it happened.

What made you sure that 'Shootout At Lokhandwala' was the film you wanted to make?

I had met up with Mr. A. A Khan who had been at the helm of the whole shootout. We went through a lot of press footage, video coverage of what actually was happened and all the content that was covered live and I felt that there was a strong story to be told.

This is the first film that you are making on a real life incident. Was there any major sensitivity you had to tackle because the film is on a real incident?

No, not really, because the dramatization of events had already been reported in the news papers and the news magazines. So after that, it is ultimately a film and you follow the story and what you want to say through the film. We have used a non linear format and we get to move away from the formula of Hindi films.

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when the actually shootout happened. Did it leave any major impact on you at that time?

I used to stay in Bandra and I was home and I remember some of my friends telling me that there has been some rioting going down at Lokhandwala which used to be a distant suburb at that point of time and at that time we didn't have so many news papers and television channels reporting the incident on a detailed scale. The word 'encounter' was new and they became infamous only later.

Do you have a knack for always good music? Is that how the music of your films always turns out to be outstanding? Any particular reason you feel it is important to place so much importance on the music?

The one aspect I enjoy the most about being a film-maker is that while making music, I get to interact with musicians, singers, composers. I am a fan of music and I enjoy listening to everything from Kishore Kumar to Shakira.

What were the difficult aspects of this venture?

To be very honest with you, there was no difficult part in this film because I had an incredible director Apoorva Lakhia who was completely in control of things. There were set backs through production which is normal in any big scale production, so that's cool.