RGV says he has no interest in saccharine movies or the characters who inhabit them. "I don't want to make a 'Devdas,'" he tells me, referring to last year's big hit, probably the most expensive Hindi movie ever made, about a man so obsessed with his first love that he dies grieving because he can't have her. "I have no patience for that character," Varma snorts. "If he can't get her, he should go find someone else."

"His films are more intellectual than the others but they aren't pretentious," says film analyst Amod Mehra. "They are all different and he always tells a good story."

RGV also doesn't care about following trends. In Bollywood, where if one family drama succeeds, 20 others follow, directors and producers make all sorts of false assumptions about audience taste. "I make movies that I want to see," he says. "I'm interested in everything. Fear, desire, greed, violence. They are all present in all people and they all are an inspiration for me. Why should I assume that the audience wants just one particular kind of film? They are not cattle. Ninety-five percent of our films flop. That should tell people they know zilch about the audiences. Audiences will watch anything that entertains them."

Varma is extremely critical of Bollywood and its methods. "I think directors and producers make movies for distributors [who fund their projects] rather than for the audience. I don't. I put my money where my mouth is and don't join the bandwagon."

RGV's films follow no identifiable pattern and adhere to no template. "Rangeela" is a musical about a chorus girl with movie star aspirations who gets her big break and finds her leading man has fallen in love with her. "Daud" is a road movie. "Kaun" is a murder mystery with only three characters. "Darna Mana Hai" is an episodic supernatural thriller. "Jungle" is inspired by the case of a notorious sandalwood smuggler and "Mast" is about a young lad's obsession with a movie actress, and is loosely based on RGV's own admiration for erstwhile Bollywood superstar Sridevi.

Of his upcoming productions, "Ab Tak Chhappan" is about police "encounters" in Bombay -- a term used when specialized officers are sent to kill dangerous criminal suspects rather than arrest them -- "Nimmi" is about a child trapped in a forest, and "Chala Vinod Tiwari Film Banane" is about a small-town man who comes to Bombay with a script, hoping to make the kind of films he loves to see.

RGV is said to be stubbornly unbending with his crew. "If someone doesn't agree with him, and I don't mean just creatively, he won't drop the subject and leave it at that. He gets extremely vindictive," says a young writer who has worked on some of RGV's successful films and has vowed to never work with him again. "He has gone out of his way to fuck me up in the industry. And I am a nobody, so people will tend to believe him. He has made it personal. He calls up people I'm working for -- he's putting his finger into my projects and trying to screw things up." This writer asked not to be identified in this article.

RGV may be a "power-tripper," as one Indian newsmagazine called him, but he is also his own worst critic. He calls some of his movies "pretty lousy," but can never be accused of making clichéd films. He doesn't brood about box office failure. He learns from his flops. "I don't get emotional about these things," he says. "I hate when people call their films their 'babies.' They are not anyone's babies. I am affected by the box office only to the extent that I continue to have the freedom to make my next film. And making my films the way I want to has never been a problem. Not in the last 12 years."

This kind of dissection seems to come easily to RGV. The man lives, eats and breathes films and has been doing so, he says, since he was 8 years old. He was deeply influenced by the Hollywood films he watched in his childhood, from "Mackenna's Gold" to "The Guns of Navarone" to "The Sound of Music" to "Jaws." As a student at engineering college in the Telugu-speaking southern state of Andhra Pradesh, he took in eight to 10 films a week, with an indulgent uncle and friends subsidizing his obsession.

"I studied films in the theaters," he says. "Once, I saw a movie seven times, and the eighth time I watched it with my eyes closed so I could absorb the musical score. I knew the story, I knew the characters, but I wanted to know how the background score worked." He would narrate movie stories to his friends, but would substitute the bits he didn't like with what he would have liked to see. Often, his friends would come back to him saying they liked his version better than the movie. "Maybe it was around that time that the germ of making movies was planted in my brain. It still wasn't a conscious desire, though."

After engineering, which he failed twice -- he hated studying -- RGV started shopping around ideas for movies. "I tried to tell stories to producers but they just couldn't understand what I was talking about," he recalls, smiling perhaps a little smugly. At that time, many Indians were going off to the Persian Gulf or African countries to find better-paying jobs. The young Varma decided to go to Nigeria to make some money and finance his own filmmaking career. On the way to acquire documents for his journey, he and his friend happened to stop at a video library.

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