Tigmanshu Dhulia explains why he has never shot a film in Mumbai, despite living there for 33 years. He feels he doesn’t belong to the city and is more rooted in the language, caste and class realities of small towns and villages, where he believes real conflicts lie. For him, Mumbai lacks the social tensions that make characters dramatically compelling.
Tigmanshu Dhulia made his directorial debut in 2003 with the crime-drama Haasil, and since then, has directed 13 feature films including notable ones like Paan Singh Tomar and Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster. The director is now awaiting the release of his upcoming title Ghamasaan, starring Arshad Warsi and Pratik Gandhi, a cat-and-mouse chase set in the heartland of India.
Beyond the fact that all of Dhulia's films have been crimes, thriller or action stories, what they also have in common is that none of them, including Ghamasaan, were shot in Mumbai — a city so central to Bollywood, where a wealth of iconic Hindi films have been shot. In fact, in an interview with ANI News in April 2025, Dhulia said he felt most people treated Mumbai as their entire world, and that he doesn't understand why most films are still being shot there.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter India ahead of the release of Ghamasaan, the director shares why he feels this way. As he goes into the depths of explaining why none of his films have been filmed in Mumbai and why characters based in a rural India setting have a stronger story, he ultimately unearths a much larger issue within the Hindi film industry that is hardly addressed.
"My characters are not from Mumbai because I don't know this city so well. I've been living here for the past 33 years and I still feel that I don't belong," shares Dhulia, who was born and brought up in Uttar Pradesh.
But before he explains why, he gives a disclaimer: "It's not the city's problem, it's my problem," he says. "I know the language and the culture of the area I come from. I know the entire caste system, the class system and the social fabric. So I understand those characters (from his hometown) well."
Because he understands this rootedness, the filmmaker also feels that he tends to find more conflict in characters who come from the lower middle class or villages "because they are the ones facing real problems. You don't face caste system here in Mumbai."
Dhulia explains that while surnames don't tend to pose an issue in Mumbai, they hold more weight in the village where they act as a divide between the upper and the lower caste. "Those characters are more interesting because there is more conflict around them."
This is where Dhulia's explanation begins to reveal the bigger issue at hand — the Hindi film industry creating films in cities, where Hindi isn't even the primary language.
"My issue is... why are we making Hindi cinema here [Mumbai]? This is not a Hindi-speaking area," he says, arguing that if Hindi cinema was created in cities that predominantly spoke the language, the industry could have, by a considerable margin, improved its literature, which he claims has rarely been adapted into films.
He also points to the pre-"Marvelisation" of Hollywood, when 99 per cent of its films were based on a novel or a short story. This, he feels, has never stood to be true in the case of Hindi cinema. "People laugh at us. Our cinema is still backward," he argues.
When the conversation eventually arrives on a thoroughly debated topic about the present state of the Hindi film industry and its pattern of investing primarily in box-office safe bets leading to saturated genres, the director has lots to say. "It takes a long time for the industry to learn and realise their mistakes, unless a few blockbusters fail. At the moment, I don't see this industry doing the right thing," he feels.
Asked about the kind of films he thinks the industry should create, Dhulia doesn't shy away from pointing to Hollywood first. "I love old Hollywood. I truly enjoy watching those films because they've got drama and they've got complex characters." But he feels that when it comes to Bollywood, "Who will write them? Were are the writers? And even if they are written, who will produce them?" he questions.
"We want anything and everything these days. What is this? I feel they're [recent Hindi films] are an insult to my intellect. That's why I don't watch them."