That’s how his films come to fruition, he adds. When he visited Jallianwala Bagh, it had a ‘chilling effect’ on him that stayed with him for years until it took the shape of a film. Shoojit says that even he doesn’t know when and how an idea begins to form in his head. “I never imagined that I would end up being a filmmaker. So, all the stories are just coming to me and I am just making them. I don’t think much about ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’,” he says. His last film, I Want to Talk (2024) again told an unusual story of a chirpy man who gets diagnosed with cancer and goes through multiple surgeries with his affectionate grumpiness. Unlike his other films though, I Want to Talk opened to a mixed response from audience and turned out to be a major failure at the box office. “When there is a box office disaster, it definitely affects you. I was shocked when the film didn’t do well,” he says, adding that for him, I Want to Talk was a ‘satirical’ and ‘hilarious’ film about a man who wants to survive. But when he saw the audiences’ reception, he realised that they were not ready to watch a film about a cancer survivor. “Maybe that’s not the state of mind they wanted to be in,” he says. The film, however, got some critical acclaim with unanimous praise for Abhishek Bachchan’s performance. What is the director’s relationship with film criticism then? “I look at some of it and learn from it. But I don’t take every review or criticism seriously. Apart from critics, I also like to listen to what the audience is saying about the film at large,” he responds.