Biography

February 24, 1946 · New Delhi, British India [now India]

[on his influences] The two real influences on cinema when I was growing up were the French New Wave and the Czech New Wave. I was fortunate to get to know and become friendly with Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer and to a certain extent Milos Forman. It was a great influence on me. There was a certain part of that world I wasn't so interested in, the sort of magical realism cinema. But I really loved Czech humor.

[on White Mischief (1987)] People liked it. It got caught up in the politics of Hollywood and ended up not being properly distributed and making any money. And it lost a lot of money for the backers, so I became persona non grata for a bit as a director does when a film loses money. And I found it very difficult. So I just went off, and I went to live in France for a bit, and I went to live in Italy, and I realised six years had past and I hadn't done anything! I'd made some money, so was okay financially, but I hadn't done anything and nobody was asking me to. Expect this Italian actor [Massimo Troisi]who would ring me up every three or four months and say come and make a film in Italy, we've got money and everything! And I thought I can't make a film in Italy. And then I suddenly started listening to what he was saying! We've got money! We can do this. We can actually make the picture. So I thought well, he's the only person who was asking me, so why not?