Hollywood Calling! - Broken Horses

Broken Horses is the first film produced and directed by an Indian from Bollywood in Hollywood. For me life has been about challenges. And the kind of reactions I’ve got from people like James Cameron and Alfonso Cuaron have been heartening. They believe I’ve successfully met the challenge. I met James Cameron in Delhi once. In the course of things, I gave him the script of Broken Horses to read. He was bowled over by the story and said he wanted to meet the writer. I told him I had written the story but had deliberately left my name from the script. Otherwise, he would have been checking for spelling mistakes and would have wondered what these Indians know about Mexican gangs! He had a good laugh at that and we became friends.

I’ve always tried to get the right actor for the right role and that stands true for this film as well. Vincent Philip D’Onofrio, who plays a key role, is one of the best character actors there. He’s an actor’s actor and holds acting workshops. Anton Yelchin is a good actor and so is Chris Marquette. I took a chance with Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi in my Hindi films earlier. I’m confident that my Hollywood cast will make history too. My DOP is Tom Stern, who is basically Clint Eastwood’s favourite cinematographer. Most of my technical crew comprises either Oscar nominees or winners.

The film is a take-off on Parinda. We have to be extra loud in our films to get the emotions across. But out there the treatment is subtle. If you were to watch the film without the end credits, it would be impossible to decipher that it is directed by an Indian. We shot the film on location near the Mexican border, in a town called Jacumba.

I learnt to speak English after watching all those American films during my course at the FTII. An American director, who once visited us, asked me which American university I had attended because of my accent. So it’s a great achievement for me – a boy who didn’t know English till he was 16, to make a film with American actors and crew

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