More numbers on the speed dial, you mean?” quips Neeraj Pandey when we ask him about the things that have changed in his approach to filmmaking in the 16 years since he burst onto the filmmaking scene with A Wednesday! The rigours of storytelling remain unchanged, he says, just as the pressures of dealing with producers, studios and networks persist. “The ability to grasp things might have gotten sharper, but now you’ve got new tech that throws new challenges. You live and learn every single day on the set, and you just hope you’re always catching up. The tech is growing faster than you can imagine, and so that part of learning is pretty complicated and you want to stay up to speed,” he says.

Pandey’s new film Sikandar Ka Muqaddar marks a return for the writer-director to the thriller, a genre he has often experimented with in the past through projects such as Special 26, Baby, Special Ops and The Freelancer. “I consider myself pretty genre-agnostic though,” he refutes. “It’s mostly about getting a story you’re excited about.”