When I first came to Bombay from Hyderabad I couldn’t get over a train ride through the Dharavi slums. It looked like one single roof and I wondered how people live there, how anybody can go in and go out
The general atmosphere of Mumbai was one thing I was really fascinated right from the time I was making Rangeela, while traveling around doing various shoots.
Once in a while I used to hear the word Underworld. Obviously I knew about Dawood Ibrahim and many of the gangsters, through whatever was revealed in the papers. But I never consciously thought about what exactly is the underworld.
People have this habit of recounting each and every moment what happened before someone met with a violent unexpected death. While he was talking, since I have this tendency all the time to think cinematically,
While being in that frame of mind, I saw some photographs in Times of India of arrested gangsters covered with black cloths on their head. Nothing about their body language looked like how Bollywood portrays them.
A friend of mine, not a film guy, who lives in Oshiwara on the fourteenth floor, told me about an instance. A guy lived in his building somewhere in a flat above him. My friend used to bump into this guy in the building’s lift once in a while. And they used to exchange pleasantries, “Hello, how are you? Happy Diwali” and things like that.
Then one day I met this guy called Ajit Devani an ex-secretary of Mandakni and because of that he reportedly knew and interacted with some of the gangsters. That’s what somebody told me.
We are social beings. We say ‘Good morning’, ‘hello how are you’ when greeting someone. We behave civilized. I thought an anti-social element lives by his own rules and he would not abide by the social rules and systems.
I went to a beer bar in Borivali to check for some location and happened to meet a guy, who was supposedly an ex-gangster. He made me feel very uneasy with his behavior and attitude. Then later on when I met him while I was shooting in that area, he was very friendly, he looked like a different person altogether.
Then one day at a place called Bara Chawl, I met a man who supposedly belongs to Arun Gawli’s gang. There was so much of built up that people gave me about him, but when I met him he came across as a sweet-natured guy. In every sentence he will use the name of Gawli, “Gawli bhai ne yeh kiya, Gawli bhai ne woh kiya, Gawli bhai ne mereko ghar leke diya”.
But the protagonist’s character was the most unclear in my head. He was unclear to me till even after the shooting. I was confused between whether he had a criminal streak in his head or he is just a normal guy who becomes that way.
Once I decided that this is a kind of film I wanted to make, the first person who came to meet me as a writer was Anurag Kashyap. So, I put him on board and he got Saurabh Shukla. We discussed a lot but nothing was clear. So there was no script on the day we started shooting.
In the first scene we were shooting, this guy comes to Satya for hafta and Satya slashes a knife on his face. In my mind the time he slashes I thought that would be the cutting point. Now Sushant played the goon’s role.
The interesting thing to note here is that the style of Satya is largely due to Sushant’s unexpected scream. If he had not screamed or if I had told him before itself that shot will cut on the slash, Satya would not have been the same.
Contract is different not in terms of emotion but in terms of the subject matter itself and I made it in a very entertaining way. It is not a dark and moody film like a Satya or Company. You can make a gangster film in the style of a Goodfellas or Godfather.