Their First Take: Indian filmmakers on life before and after the first films they directed

Did you know that Anurag Basu urged Priyanka Chopra to hurl her choicest abuses at him during the filming of Barfi just so that he could break the ice with the actor? Or that Farah Khan's was an assistant director with Shankar Nag in Malgudi Days? These and more such trivia is what make-up Rakesh Anand Bakshi's Director's Diaries: The Road To Their First Film, collection of conversations with director about their craft.

Bakshi, a screenwriter, and bicycle enthusiast, says he hit upon the idea, because in India unlike the West, directors do not have a platform to talk about their work. The book, consisting of interactions with various directors, is sneak into their lives; a look at how they arrived at the director's seat. Some struggled through years of hard work, others fiddled with other odd jobs for a decade to realise their potential. Almost all were taken in by the mystique of the world behind the camera.

Bakshi, son of the legendary lyricist Anand Bakshi, could not have chosen a more diverse list of directors; there's Anurag Basu, Farah Khan, Ashutosh Gowariker, Imtiaz Ali, Vishal Bhardwaj, Santosh Sivan, Prakash Jha and Mahesh Bhatt, to name a few. What tumbles out, mostly, are crucial mundane details that reflect in the directorial styles of the directors.

Anurag Basu, whose first experience was with teleserial Tara in the 1990s, says he worked odd jobs for many years to fund college. And that he found a lot of joy on film sets. He talks of the time he worked as a dancing extra, and of the times he was a plastic chair salesman.

Ashutosh Gowariker, who started out as an actor with contemporaries like Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Deepak Tijori, says that after the first film, a director is robbed of his spontaneity and innocence.

Govind Nihalani, whose critically-acclaimed Tamas is a reflection of his family's turmoils during the Partition, says that the day he decided to learn filmmaking in Bengaluru, he told himself that he would one day make a film on a story based on events during the Partition.

There's Mahesh Bhatt talking about a scene from Zakhm, were the protagonist's father played by Nagarjuna does not open his shoes at home, and tells the director that the scene is from his childhood. His father Nanabhai Bhatt, already married, was never married to his mother, a Muslim woman, and would not take his shoes off in their house.

Subhash Ghai recalls the time legendary filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak told him to pay special attention to cinematographers. Filmmaker-composer, who worked with Bakshi's father and was even one of his pallbearer's, remembers the time he lost his own father because of financial constraints, and of the time he played the harmonium at food festivals. He remembers walking towards a house where his father lay dead. "Even now, when I see a Steadicam point-of-view shot, I travel back. I am reminded of that walk," he said.