Gali Guleiyan (In The Shadows) director Dipesh Jain, who has taken the film on child abuse to many prestigious international film festivals, feels different cultures respond differently to violence.
"This has become a talking point everywhere that I've taken the film. It's amazing how differently diverse cultures react to the child abuse in my film. When I showed it in Britain, they found it to be extreme violence. But in Israel they responded to the child's physical abuse as we do (in India). Many cultures tend to normalise violence," said the Los Angeles-based director.
Jain undertook rigorous research on domestic and child abuse.
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"I was doing research for a documentary I was planning to make on child violence and how that leads to mental issues. There's an alarming number of kids that go through violence across cultures. And more horrifically, these kids have 80% more chances of developing schizophrenia.
"There was a big case in Texas where the kid was tried in court for killing his father because he was brutally beaten. And it was debated the world over if it's okay to place total responsibility on a kid who is still growing up."
Casting Manoj Bajpayee as a man traumatised by his circumstances and trapped in his environment proved a blessing and a curse.
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"Blessing for me, and a curse for Manoj," laughed the director.
"I was scared of what the character was doing to Manoj. I thought he was immersed in his character. But when he told me that he was on the brink of a mental breakdown, I panicked. He just sat there and waited for his shot. Always in character."
Jain said Bajpayee's character represents urban disaffection at its most acute.
"I see it everywhere. Essentially I wanted to tell a story of man trapped in the maze of an old city. But I was not interested in just physical entrapment. That would have been too thin and not layered. But when I was working on researching for a documentary on child violence, it suddenly hit me — what about entrapment of the mind?
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"These people never get out of their past and trauma. So a man trapped in the city because he is still trapped in his mind, and the past won't let him go. And city becomes representative of his mind. It started to make sense for a story."
The shock ending of Gali Guleiyan has been seen by many critics as a means to send audiences home with a delectable secret. But Jain doesn't see the film's finale as a fit of flourish.
"My idea was never to build a film suspense like Manoj Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense. For me, that would have cheapened it. I didn't want audiences to come out of the film only talking about the twist. Though I could have easily done that in the edit by removing the clues, but I deliberately kept them -- wanting the audience to find out, then watch the journey unfold.
"I thought that will create a bigger discussion about the movie. Because right now, the point of revelation is different for a different audience. So they also come out and talk about this, along with their experience of the movie."
Jain is now working on two projects.
"One is in casting in LA. It's called A Stone's Throw Away, a political drama set in Kashmir that explores relationship between a loner American dam engineer and Kashmir child soldier. The second is a series we will pitch to HBO, based on a real person. It will be shot in New York and Sikkim (we currently have four writers from London and LA in our writers' room). That will have Chinese, Hollywood and Indian actors working on it."