There was a time when I would hang out at a cinema hall called Vijayalaxmi in Kamayyathopu, Vijayawada. My friends Sridhar and Nair, and I were the most useless bums in our college. Every day, without exception, we would watch movies, some of them repeatedly at the Vijayalaxmi.

I have always maintained that the director is not a primary artiste. The actor, story writer, music composer and cinematographer are all primary artistes. The director amalgamates their work into a composite experience to create a specific emotional impact on the audience. Watching a film should be an emotional

Let there be background music. I saw Alien 17 times in Vijayawada’s Urvashi theatre. During at least three of the shows I’d just shut my eyes so that the visuals wouldn’t disturb my concentration on the music. I’d hide a tape-recorder

In Ramapriya, a dilapidated theatre in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, for the first time I began to understand the phenomenon of Amitabh Bachchan.

I came back from my engineering exam and told my father that I had done the test so badly that if I pass, then anyone could. Later I realised that it was a terribly insensitive thing to say to my middle class father who was struggling to make ends meet.

It was way past midnight. I was returning from a late night shoot of one of my horror films to my eighth-floor apartment. I crept into bed, and was trying to sleep when I felt that the ghost from my movie was lurking behind the wall-cupboard.

Ayn Rand said, “If you see a beautiful woman with a pimple on her face you would think nothing of it...

Many times people ask me on when exactly my thinking took a certain turn. The answer to that is when a guy called Satyendra Sunkavally came into my life. Undoubtedly, he is the most intelligent and knowledgeable man I have ever met in my life. He was a couple of years younger than me and my junior at the Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. I was studying civil engineering, he was in the mechanical branch.

It was just another day. I happened to be in the company of a man called Haneef Lakdawalla at a film producer’s house. Haneef was the owner of Magnum Video, he had been in jail for the Mumbai 1992/1993 serial blasts case for five years. Talk was that he was very close to Dawood Ibrahim.

The Ten Command-ments… or all that you wanted to know about publicity.
I have always been honest. I have screamed from the media rooftops that I am into publicity all the time. Actually whatever anyone related to films does, it is solely for publicity.