His latest role, in a film with Oscar buzz, has the Indian superstar Anil Kapoor more determined than ever to transform Bollywood into a global entertainment juggernaut. David Gritten talks to him about family, longevity and his new career as a producer.

In his new film Slumdog Millionaire, a British production set in Mumbai, the Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor plays a character of extraordinary charisma. As Prem Kumar, the fictional presenter of the Indian version of the TV game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Kapoor struts around the set as if he personally owns it, patronises a contestant – and keeps the studio audience in the palm of his hand with knowing sideways glances and supercilious wit. He can summon laughter or applause from them at will. It's quite a performance.
But then Kapoor knows something about presence, whether on a big screen or a small one. He has been a Bollywood leading man for 25 years, and his agreement to star in a film is sufficient to get it financed. Simply put, he is an idol, and his effect on fans is remarkable. Slumdog Millionaire's British director, Danny Boyle, witnessed the Kapoor effect first hand when he was shooting the scenes of the game show: "It took two weeks and the extras who made up the audience came in day after day and eventually got restless and bored, just sitting there.
"I did my best to keep them motivated, to get them to applaud wildly or laugh at the jokes. It was hard going. But then Anil took over and they hung on his every word. Whatever he asked them to do, they did it. He was fantastic. He really got them going. And I was just sitting there thinking, 'What do I know? I'm just the director'."

Boyle is right to rave about his star. Slumdog Millionaire, which will have a gala performance at the Dubai International Film Festival this week, has had ecstatic reviews since its release at the end of last month, with talk of Oscars and commercial success even before the recent terrorist attacks gave it unintended resonance.
The urban fairy tale won three prizes at the British Independent Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director for Danny Boyle. In November, it won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto film festival, often an indicator of future Oscar nominations (past winners include Life Is Beautiful, Hotel Rwanda, Chariots Of Fire and American Beauty.)

Kapoor, 49, smiles when I repeat Boyle's recollections to him. "I just want every aspect of a film I work on to be as good as possible. So whatever I can do to help, I'll do. If that means encouraging the extras, fine."
"They should have given you more money," I tell him teasingly. Kapoor pats an imaginary wallet in his suit pocket: "I got it!" he says, laughing.

We meet in a quiet room at a club in London's Covent Garden. Kapoor looks every inch the superstar he is, in an expensive, beautifully tailored silver-grey suit. He has a piercing gaze, a firm handshake and a trim, almost sculpted appearance, with a neat beard and steel-grey hair swept back in a neat pompadour. A diamond glitters on each ear lobe. Yet his manner is informal, confident and occasionally mischievous; laughter comes easily to him.
He seems very much what he is: a man at the top of his game, a considerable star in the firmament of the hugely lucrative industry that is Bollywood. As such, he has become immensely wealthy, famous and successful; one would not expect him to be feeling pangs of discontent or experiencing a desire to rock the boat.

Yet in the course of a long, wide-ranging interview, Kapoor candidly revealed his disenchantment with many working practices common in Bollywood, and his determination to raise standards within India's film industry.
"Too often," he says, "the intent is to wrap up the work and make as much money as quickly as possible, and finish films off, one after the other."

He cites the practice of actors, directors and crew members working on more than one film at the same time – typically, Bollywood actors appear in around six films a year.

"It's humanly impossible to give 100 per cent of yourself if you work like that," he says.
He believes that actors are the worst culprits, and the all-encompassing Bollywood star system encourages unprofessional behaviour.

"I know of actors who have been called for a 7am shift and come in at 12 noon. They come when they want to. I've heard of actors who were due on set to work in a sunrise shot, and they'd say, 'Why do you want a sunrise shot? Why not shoot it at sunset and make [believe it's] sunrise?'"
He mentions stars who suddenly announce to their producers that they will not be available to work the next day because they have a lucrative commercial to shoot.

And, worst of all in Kapoor's eyes, some Bollywood films go into production without a complete script. "There are too many film-makers who believe in not giving you the script because they're not ready with it, they haven't finished. So they'll just give you the scene that has to be shot that day. You get the script for a scene shortly before you actually go on set to shoot it."
But surely you can't work like that?

"I've done it. There is a film of mine called Yuvvraaj (released last month), where in some scenes, I got the script 20 minutes before I would go in front of the camera." He laughs bitterly. "You must go and see that film!"

Kapoor sees himself as one of a small group of "like-minded people" working in Hindi film who want to raise standards in the industry. Intriguingly, his comments coincided with a seminar at the Indian Film Festival in Abu Dhabi in November, at which speakers led by producer Bobby Bedi (Bandit Queen) called for the creation of an Indian Film Academy, along the lines of the American academy that awards Oscars.
This, they argued, would help rejuvenate the Indian industry and encourage it to create films of an international standard.

This chimes perfectly with Kapoor's views. "For a while, I've felt like the odd man out," he says. "But quite a few of us were the odd ones out, trying to do things in a systematic, professional, dedicated way, and wanting scripts in advance. Preparation is what makes the work a joy. If you come on set, and you're not prepared and everything is completely chaotic, it's not a joy at all."
Working on Slumdog Millionaire, he says, further increased his determination to improve industry standards in Bollywood. In Boyle, the film boasts a world-class director, a hero to Kapoor's son Harsh, who has a poster from Boyle's best-known film, Trainspotting, on his bedroom wall. (When Kapoor first received a phone message from Boyle about the film, he was not sure who he was. His son said tersely: "It's Danny Boyle. Call him back!")
And its script was written by Simon Beaufoy, globally acclaimed as the screenwriter of that delicate comedy-drama The Full Monty. Far from being unprepared, Beaufoy made several trips to Mumbai before shooting to capture the atmosphere of the bustling city and devise storylines. He returned to India during rehearsals, and made adjustments to the script with the chosen actors in mind.

Slumdog Millionaire is about Jamal, an 18-year-old orphan boy (played by Dev Patel, who lives in London and is a star of the Channel 4 teen series Skins). He works as a tea boy in a Mumbai call centre, and, through a fortuitous turn of events, is chosen to appear as a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Even more remarkably, although Jamal grew up in Mumbai's slums and is totally uneducated, he correctly answers a series of questions that puts him one round away from winning the competition's top prize – 20 million rupees.
But how does a boy from such a humble background know the answers? The widespread assumption is that Jamal must be cheating – which is why we see him being interrogated roughly by police in early scenes. Yet Beaufoy's ingenious script, adapted liberally from Vikas Swarup's episodic novel Q&A, reveals how he knew the answers to those very specific questions.

The progressive success of the young slumdog makes him an underdog hero to India's TV audiences – to the unease of the show's presenter Prem Kumar.
Kapoor explains: "As Prem Kumar, I am the number-one star in the whole country, and suddenly there's a youngster who comes along – so now who's the star? He's the star, so there's someone else who's bigger than Prem Kumar.

"What we learn is that Prem Kumar is a small man. He's from the slums, too. He fought his way to the top. But his family is in shambles, he doesn't get along with his wife and he has a girlfriend. He's completely a small man who's just trying to hold on."
Certain aspects of Prem Kumar's story hold real resonance for Kapoor, in terms of how he views his career. "It's a beautiful script," he says. "And the character was written for me – there was no way I could have turned it down. It reminded me of all my experiences of my entire career, the ups and downs, the hardships and humiliations, and what I went through to achieve what I've achieved. Youngsters kept coming through and threatening to take my position. All those things kept happening to me, every five or six years in my career."
the difference for Kapoor is that he has a contented family background. He has been married to his wife, Sunita, who was a model, since 1984, and they have three children – son, Harsh, and two daughters, Sonam and Rhea.

"I have wondered what Prem Kumar has gone through, in his life," he muses. "But in real life, there's a spirituality and a certain kind of education and intellect that make you who you are, and help you believe in going for longevity rather than trying to hold on to [stardom]. Here I am with a family, with surroundings that make me think, 'Look, I can't go on forever with this.' So you look for different kinds of work."
In Kapoor's case, producing more and acting less is the answer. His acting career now includes more than 100 films in almost 30 years, but he entered the fray of producing in 2002 with Badhaai Ho Badhaai, and again in 2007 with the critically acclaimed Gandhi, My Father, a film with both Hindi and English dialogue; it deals with Mahatma Gandhi's fraught relationship with his wayward son Harilal.
Next year will see the release of two more films produced by Kapoor: the comedy Shortcut: The Con Is On; and another title he is hurrying to complete in time to show at the Cannes film festival, Dekh Tamasha Dekh, which he translates as "please come and see our show". "It's a black comedy," he explains. "It's about a dead body and no one knows the religion of the dead person, whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim. They don't know whether to burn it or bury it."
It seems, then, that his luminous acting career will be allowed to dwindle. "I only want to act in films that are really special," he says. At this stage of his life, producing best satisfies his need to exert quality control over all aspects of films.

There's no surprise about this; Kapoor describes himself accurately as a producer's son. "I'm from a film family. My father Surinder used to make films. Then my older brother Boney was producing films and I was with him, so we made films together.
"But I chose to become an actor. To produce films was hard. Money was not easily available in those days. And there was no discipline and professionalism. There was a huge star system, and the industry was completely chaotic. So I saw my father going through all kinds of problems and retiring at a very early age – late forties, early fifties – because he couldn't take it. I couldn't bear my father going through that, so I decided to be an actor. I wanted to be a star so my family wouldn't need to work with actors who are completely unprofessional and undisciplined. That motivated me to become an actor."
k apoor and his brother, Boney, deliberately set out to work with talented directors and actors who shared their attitude towards professionalism and discipline. These included Shekhar Kapur, who directed Mr India in 1987, with Boney as producer and Kapoor starring as a heroic man who looks after orphaned children. The film was a huge hit and remains an all-time classic.

It propelled Kapoor into the top flight of Bollywood stars, just at a point when the earlier generation, typified by Amitabh Bachchan, were beginning to get a bit long in the tooth. Kapoor and his contemporaries, Jackie Shroff and Sunny Deol, became the new faces of Bollywood's leading men. Mr India also gave Shekhar Kapur an international profile; he later directed Bandit Queen in 1994, and the two British films starring Cate Blanchett as England's Queen Elizabeth I.
"It's the people you work with who make a difference when you're young," says Kapoor. "The people around me moulded me and taught me about professionalism, lighting, camerawork, the need to shoot in the right light."

Now he hopes to pass those values on, and says all of Bollywood is studying Slumdog Millionaire very closely: "How it's going to be marketed, what is going to be its fate. All the like-minded film-makers are watching it. They want it to succeed."
And Kapoor believes his experiences on Boyle's film will help pave the way for him becoming an international producer. Although he has been given countless awards from his own industry – most recently a Stardust award for Gandhi, My Father – it is international recognition he craves to take his industry further. On next year's Oscars hangs so much.

Meanwhile, he is flourishing, and moves in heady circles. He casually drops into our conversation that he met Will Smith when the American actor visited Mumbai earlier this year. "He's the biggest movie star in the world, yet he's very humble and down to earth. He came over for dinner to my house and I showed him portions of my film Gandhi, My Father." Afterwards, Smith asked Kapoor about the below-the-line budget of his film (that is, excluding the salaries of its stars)."I told him to guess," Kapoor recalls. "He said in America it would be around $50 million. I told him I made the film for $4 million."
And in that story, Kapoor believes, lies the secret that can give Bollywood films a niche in an international marketplace: they are relatively cheap to produce. Until now, Bollywood films have only made an impact in countries with immigrant populations from the subcontinent.

"Our market is the Asian diaspora. When I have a film to promote I travel to the USA, Britain and Canada. They do well in the Middle East, especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which are quite lucrative. There are a lot of Indians living there, too.
"Egypt is a good market, and slowly we're making progress among Malaysians, Indonesians, Russians, the Surinamese. It's gradual. We have become popular in Germany. But if our films are made to a standard of international quality, our industry can grow even further."

While he waits for that to happen, Kapoor is establishing himself as the patriarch of a new Bollywood dynasty. His son Harsh seems set on becoming a producer, and was about to accompany Anil on a business meeting in Los Angeles.
And then there are his two daughters. One, Sonam, is already a leading actress at age 23. "She has a cinematic face," shrugs Kapoor. "She comes on screen and that's it.

"My other daughter, Rhea, doesn't have a cinematic face. So what I told her is: work towards it. Don't try to be a star. Just work, slowly, steadily, behind the camera. Maybe direct. Then excel as an actress. Do that and you'll form a brand, an image, the kind of talent you are. And people will look at you differently." Rhea could do worse than take the advice seriously. After all, it worked for her father.