Ashim Ahluwalia takes his self-assigned role as the Indian film industry’s outlier very seriously. In 2012, an exceptionally stellar year for the Bollywood box office, Ashim Ahluwalia’s low-budget noir Miss Lovely, starring a not-yet-famous Nawazuddin Siddiqui, was hitting the international festival circuit, collecting wreaths and laurels at Cannes, Toronto, IFFLA in New York before it became du jour for independent “auteurs” to do so. 

Ahluwalia had already won a National Award for his documentary John & Jane in 2007, and by the time Miss Lovely (two more National Awards) got a commercial release in theatres in 2014, he had cemented his place in the pantheon of film-makers from India to “watch out for”. In Ahluwalia’s own words, he’s “one of those guys who’s totally okay with taking forever to make a small film, with some obscure French production house funding it.” A ₹500 crore Bollywood film? Not interested. 

And yet, here he is, sitting at a booth at the Kala Ghoda Café in south Mumbai’s art district, drowning giant gulps of his omelette with the house-special kombucha, to discuss his newest film, Daddy: an all-out crime drama based on the true story of the enigmatic Mumbai-based gangster-turned-politician-turned-convict Arun Gawli, with a big (ish) budget and starring Arjun Rampal. What gives?  

Tell us about Daddy – how did this film happen for you? 

Arjun [Rampal] and I met on an ad film set. He told me he had the film rights to Arun Gawli’s story but wasn’t quite in sync with his producers. He’d seen Miss Lovely and read some of the press interviews I’d done. He understood my take on Bollywood. I guess he wanted something different with this film.

Did that surprise you?   

Yeah, it was odd that out of all people, this guy was aware of my cinematic sensibility. He’s smart and direct but has often just been slotted into this pretty boy category. Arjun wanted a challenge; and to me, our combination was intriguing. I knew that some people would be quick to assume that this is my sellout film, but this project is like nothing you’d expect. It’s unlike anything else that’s been made. And I couldn’t say no to someone who said, “I’ll protect your freedom as a director.” Nobody does that.

What was it like for Arjun to get into character?

Arjun spent so much time thinking about this project that, by the time we met, he was already quite in character. He’d been talking to Gawli’s family and friends, meeting the man on parole and taking notes. He came to me with extreme receptiveness, willing to be pushed. So I pushed. Hard. Gawli’s the sort of guy who doesn’t project but melds into the background. That’s how I wanted Arjun to play him – always on the backfoot. I told him he’d have to learn Marathi and do the prosthetics; we will shoot in Kamathipura; I don’t care if you’re a star or not. There were days when he would have a meltdown and be like, “I’ve been wearing latex on my face for 14 hours, sitting in this hot room in a brothel!” I do admire that he put up with how crazy and demanding I can be, and that really shows in his performance. 

Tell us about the first time you met Gawli. 

It was very intimidating. All the producers and Arjun and Gawli (out on parole) were already sitting in plastic chairs, surrounded by this tight circle: an inner ring of older comrades, and an outer one of younger hitmen and some police guys who looked rather lost. It really felt like I’d come to meet Al Capone.

Nobody introduced me. From the moment I sat down, I could sense that Gawli couldn’t concentrate. At one point, he just turned to me and asked if I was “taping-waping” anything, in Marathi. He struck me as this really paranoid, hyper-aware guy who’s perceptive of every shadow, every sound. With people wanting to try and bump him off or “encounter” him at any moment, you can’t blame him.

You have a reputation for insisting on authenticity, for giving feature films a documentary-like treatment. What sort of research went into making Daddy?

I grew up in south Bombay in the Eighties, so I knew of the gang wars through the newspapers. It was an everyday matter to see dead bodies on front pages – grainy black-and-white images of some guy shot in the head at a dance bar, with no attempt to conceal identities or anything. But really, it’s all street history. We spent a lot of time with hitmen, active and retired, with police informers, cops who worked for these gangs, and we got all these amazing stories, all these unwritten laws of this “lawless” society. The ethics of “getting a hit done”, for example, or the fact that they’d have ceasefires on religious occasions, and actually invite the opposition to discuss territorial stuff. These [chawls] were kingdoms. 

Gawli just never seemed to fit into this gangster mythology, he was always in his white kurta and topi. But when I met him, I realized this was no accident. We found this incredible 1979 mugshot of him at the Agripada station – it’s what inspired the film poster – and he has this cool hairstyle and a floral shirt. He was slick. It’s amazing that a person can look like two completely different people in their past and their present.

You’ve shown the film to Gawli. How did he react? 

He fell silent after the screening. I think that was when it hit him (and his family) – that maybe the film cut too close to the bone. Maybe they were expecting something a bit larger-than-life, more heroic. But Gawli’s also very perceptive. Once we convinced him that his real story was worth telling and that we had no interest in making a Sarkar-type film, he just went all in. He began fact-checking the film, from the way we portrayed his mentor’s death, to the headlines on newspaper articles from decades ago.

Any trouble with the CBFC on this one? 

There isn’t any controversial information in the film that isn’t already out in the public domain. Sure, we’ve changed some names, but you only need to scratch the surface to find the real story. As for the violence, Daddy’s like a children’s film compared to what’s on the evening news. Anyway, the trouble is never violence, it’s always sex. A country of 1.2 billion, scared to talk about sex. It’s just unfortunate.

What’s coming up for you after Daddy?

A love story called The Boyfriend, based on the first published Indian gay novel, between a banker and a working-class boy, set in contemporary Mumbai. Obviously, it can’t be India-centric, so we have French and Canadian producers financing it, and we begin filming next year. It’s both very moving and has got every explosive device in it that you can think of – and I’m very excited.