You are known as a storyteller. How did your friends and those who know you come to peg you as one?

I guess I am a product of the society we live in. Nepali society, I believe, is full of stories—the stories you hear in the chiya pasals, in our homes and so on. And we have so many oral stories and tales too, and so many mythological stories to draw upon. And then when I started attending St. Joseph’s College, in Darjeeling, I started reading a lot of books, and stories became a part of my education. I was more interested in novels and short stories than in the text books we were supposed to read. In fact, during what we used to call ‘study time’, when we were to be reading our text books and doing homework, I would have a novel hidden under the desk and read that.

When did you start getting interested in films?

I started out watching Amitabh Bachchan movies, back in the early eighties. Then I got into Hollywood in the nineties. And later, when I went to Luther College, in Iowa, I got introduced to ‘foreign films’, that is, European films, Japanese films and so on. Bollywood and Hollywood took a backseat, as I got interested in more of the non-mainstream films.

Did you think about getting into movies very early on?

It happened over the years. In college, my major was Communications, and when I returned to Nepal in 1996, I thought I should get into radio and television. So I tried to work in these mediums, at some of the places around town, but I don’t think I was interested in the media and the people I was working with were not interested in me either. So there was a mutual disconnect, I guess. And I started working independently. I got a digital camera and a computer to do my editing, and I started doing my own work. I don’t think the work was all that great, to be honest, but at least the work was mine. I made a few documentaries for the development sector. But then, I lost interest in that kind of work too, because everything was mostly pre-scripted, and I was only creating work on behalf of these organisations. I have always wanted to do something that was more liberating and more creative.

Is that when you made the big leap?

My partners and I got into the movie business when we took over Jai Nepal. We were thinking of screening mostly Hollywood movies because we felt there was a market for them. But then we realised that we needed to screen Bollywood films too. And as we got into the film-screening business, I started getting back to my filmmaking roots too. I told my partners that we should make Nepali feature films. But I didn’t have the training and didn’t know how to go about it. And we couldn’t find the filmmakers we believed we needed to make our films. So we started looking at music video directors. And we homed in on Bhushan Dahal. We asked him if he would be interested in directing films for us; he said yes, after which, we got a good team of people together, and ended up making Kagbeni. It wasn’t a huge success, but I do believe that we were at least doing things a little differently from what was the norm.

Such as using a literary text, The Monkey’s Paw, for the script?

Actually, I always thought The Monkey’s Paw would make a great short film. But when I mentioned that to my friends, everyone said a film based on a script like that wouldn’t work. But because I have always loved stories like The Monkey’s Paw, I believed the movie would turn out fine. Even today, I love films that are based on classic literary texts and books. Also, I always thought that the story would resonate with the Nepali public—the whole thing about how karma takes its course and so on.

How did you get into making more mainstream movies?

I think we just got a little greedy for a bit, and we thought we should make more commercial films. But I had no idea about how to make commercial—formulaic—films. Actually, even today, I don’t know how to make such films. And anybody who is coming to watch Suntali expecting a formulaic film will probably be disappointed. So we sought the help of the late Alok Nembang, who was very popular back then. But the commercial film we were going to make would be inspired by Korean films, rather than by Bollywood. And that’s how we created Saano Sansar.

And what made you want to create something like Suntali?

I have always admired some of the quirky Irish films and the Scottish and Welsh films from the British Isles, which were being produced in the nineties—films such as The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain. I wanted to make movies like that. I did try to make some short ones in that vein. But most of my attempts were really bad. So I decided to go study filmmaking at the Prague Film School, in the Czech Republic. I made a few really short films after I got back. But short films are financially risky. It’s hard to recoup one’s investments. That’s why our team decided to make Suntali a feature-length film. We thought about mixing various narrative traditions—everything from Bollywood masalas and the fantasies we were moved by when we were kids to elements from literature and so on. I mean, I realise that’s pretty ambitious of us. But I think we should at least get a passing grade for Suntali.