"I don't suffer fools gladly"

“I don’t suffer fools gladly,” remarks Nagesh Kukunoor at the promotion of his film, Dor in Delhi on Wednesday. “When I work on the sets, I expect every single person to come prepared to the day otherwise I get irritated.” This very meticulous attitude for details has given the director years of success in the industry. “Film acting is not about giving one perfect shot and going home, it is about making each shot a perfect shot all the time.”
“I was just another normal kid in Hyderabad,” he says of his childhood days. “I went to school with the kids of the neighbourhood for sometime before my parents decided to send me to boarding school. So, I went on to Montfort School in Yercaud, that’s where I have based my film Rockford on.”
On completion of school, Kukunoor moved when to study engineering at the Georgia Tech University in the United States after winning a full scholarship to fund his education. “I used to write quite a lot even as a kid. My mom shows me all the stories that she had saved and I have a good laugh reading them,” he says. Ask him what they were about and he laughs, “Oh! It’s a whole lot of sci-fi and monster stories”.
Dor is one of his own stories and besides that he says he has eight other finished scripts. “Two of the lot are action stories,” says the lover of Jurrasic Park and Star Wars. “I grew up watching Bollywood movies and I was always keen on seeing the director’s perspective, even as a child.”
The director also lives his dream of being an actor through his cinema. In fact, Iqbal is the only film by Kukunoor in which he does not play a cameo role. “Yes, I have a role in Dor as well, but I would rather have people go to the theatre and see me than talk about it here.”
Ask him for advice for aspiring directors and he is quick to retort, “I don’t do that stuff. It’s like telling someone you don’t know this and since I know, do it the way I tell you.”
“As it is, today’s Indian filmmakers don’t stop talking when they are given a chance,” he says after a pause. “The basic quality you need to be a good director is having an original mind for great ideas,” he says signing off.

Published in Hindustan Times Next on September 21, 2006