I love action films because I have grown up seeing some of the brilliant movies of the genre like 'Ghatak,' 'Ghayal,' 'Shiva.' Watching people doing such stunts had always mesmerised me and fascinated me to think that I should also do such things if I become a hero.
Maybe because I come from choreography, I've always felt that there's something about action films that made it very natural for me to go that way. It's story through movement.
I was raised with James Bond. I love James Bond movies. I would love to do a James Bond movie one day. Action is very cinematic.
The battle scenes in 'Gladiator' don't have the exultant lift of Hong Kong period-action pictures like the 'Once Upon a Time in China' series, where the fights have the eye-popping panache of dance sequences from a musical.
The action stuff takes a long time but when you're there and you're doing it and you go into that take and you run and everything is blowing up around you and you're diving onto something it's actually incredibly thrilling and you feel like a kid again. Like a kid, who used to play and pretend all those things would happen and now they're actually happening.
The action pictures I've been typically involved with, when somebody gets punched, you really feel the punching, and when somebody gets shot, you really feel the shot.
The close-up, according to D.W. Griffith, allows subtle changes of facial expression-the raising of an eyebrow or the flicker of a smile-to become part of the action.
I didn't want to do movies with hundreds of camels crossing the desert followed by tanks and this and that.
