Game On

Just like his films,Deo too needed more time to find his true calling. This,despite his personal feat of delivering each and every dialogue of Sholay along with the accompanying background music and losing count of the number of times he has watched Amar Akbar Anthony and Teesri Manzil.

There is also his film lineage,Deo is the younger son of veteran actors Seema and Ramesh Deo,to draw him towards Bollywood. “My parents worked with directors such as Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Bimal Roy. We discussed movies in our drawing room,but when it came to choosing our career path the choice was ours,” he says.

At 40,one might think Deo is a late bloomer in Bollywood. But he gleefully follows the philosophy of “better late than never”. With two of Bollywood’s biggest production houses — Excel Entertainment and Aamir Khan Productions — backing his projects,he is hardly complaining. “Both the houses got in touch with me around the same time,when I had decided to quit advertising three years ago to do feature films,” he says.

This is not the first time that he has changed his career path. Deo,who studied to be an architect,had moved to advertising soon after. “I wanted to make movies but early ’90s was the worst time in Bollywood,” he says. Since it was the boom time in advertising,he opted for it and worked as an ad filmmaker for 18 years. Strangely,the year he was chosen as the best director of ad films,he called it quits. “I never did an ad after that.” But his ad experience came handy while making movies.

Deo,a self-confessed Sherlock Holmes fan,was excited when Excel asked him to direct a thriller. “It is a challenge to keep your audiences hooked and take them to another level,” he says. On the other hand,Delhi Belly relates to a different class of audience. “We decided to make it in English because some films just lend itself to a particular language,” he says.

The biggest influence on him has been Charlie Chaplin. “He taught me the concept of paradox. My urge is to make cinema that can make you laugh and cry at the same time. The next script I am working on is a paradox,” states Deo,who henceforth plans to co-produce all his films. A constant learner,Deo also has an animation film on his wishlist. So,is he now sure that making films is his final calling? “You can never be sure. Tomorrow,I might want to be a scuba diver.”