Dev Benegal is not filmmaker in a hu­rry. The 49-year-old Be­negal made his first movie Eng­lish August, based on Upa­ma­nyuChatterjee’s epony­mous in 1994. His se­cond feature film Split Wide Open that chronicled the water wars in Mu­mbai, was released in 1999. It took ten years for the man who created a lan­dmark in contemporary cinema, to get his next movie to theatres.

Having showcased Road, Movie, at different film festivals across the world, Benegal’s third and the latest film was released in India recently. The flick about traveling cinema in India stars Abhay Deol, Tannishtha Chatterjee and Satish Kaushik.

“I write and I direct. Wh­en I write I take time to write I also have different interests. Photography being one of them, drawing and illustration being another and writing being the third. The­refore, directing movies is one of the things that I am actually busy with,” said Benegal about the long bre­aks between his movies.

While Benegal promises the wait will not be too long for the next one from him, he refrains from giving too many details about his next two movies. He is working on Samurai, an urban thr­iller set in Mumbai that plays out as a chess game between an elusive hit man, the gli­ttering world of show busi­ness, the shadowy und­erwo­rld and the law. According to Benegal the mo­vie is an ho­mage to Jean Pierre Mel­ville’s crime cla­ssic, Le Sa­mourai.

The other movie that he is working on is about the life of genius Indian math­ematician Srinivasa Rama­n­ujan and his friendship with the Cambridge math don GH Hardy. Benegal will co-write and co-direct this mo­vie with British director Step­hen Fry.

Ever since the release of Road, Movie Benegal has been watching the movie with audience at different theatres to get a first hand experience of how the au­dience is reacting to his mo­vie. According to him, the inspiration to make this mo­vie was about his own experience of seeing the pop­ularity of traveling cin­ema and how passionate pe­ople are about watching movies in the interior heartlands of India. “The truth is that about 70 per cent of the Indian population still wat­ches movies outdoors. They do not watch movies in the comfort of modern multiplexes. It is just the desire to enjoy a movie that these pe­ople flock to temp­orary te­nts in an open gro­und. They just want a dose of entert­ainment. No­thing el­se,” sa­id Benegal.

Benegal’s first film English August became the first Indian independent film to be acquired by Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox and became a theatrical su­ccess. Interestingly, Hollywood star Robert De Niro’s company Tribeca Film has bought the rights for Road, Movie for mainstream distribution in the US.