After seeing Jurassic Park, he wanted to be like Steven Spielberg, and he later admired the Chinese director Zhang Yimou.
[2][6] He was cinematographer, director, co-producer, co-writer, and co-editor of his first feature film, Love and Shukla (originally titled Haanduk[10]) which premiered at Busan in 2017.
[1] It also screened at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2024,[7] where it won the Feature Fiction Award.
While its cast consists mostly of non-professional actors, its technical crew features some big names in cinema, including Japanese composer Umebayashi Shigeru, sound designer Resul Pookutty (Slumdog Millionaire), and colour grading by the Chinese studio owned by director Wuershan.
The idea for the plot came from what turned out to be a fabricated story about young people sending their parents into the forest to be killed by a tiger so that they could claim compensation, but this led him to do a lot of research into the poverty experienced by rural communities in India, and he wanted to make a film about social issues.