MUMBAI: Putting an end to all speculation about Kalki Koechlin being a part of Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitaan because Anurag Kashyap is producing the film, Nambiar says he had only Kalki in mind for the part long before Kashyap stepped in as producer.

“It’s the role of a half-American girl. You tell me, among the current lot of actresses in Hindi cinema who can play an American convincingly except Kalki? It had to be Kalki. Anyone else would have looked fake. I pursued her relentlessly until she finally agreed. But I had no producer at that point of time. It was only later that Anurag Kashyap came into the picture as a producer,” Nambiar, who assisted Mani Ratham before branching out as an independent director, tells Businessofcinema.com.

Now with the producer and actress from Shaitaan getting married, there’s the danger of Shaitaan being noticed for reasons other than intrinsic merit.

Nambiar says, “I hope once people see the film they will stop talking about everything except my work as a filmmaker.”

Making Shaitaan was not easy for Nambiar. “I shot a chase sequence between the hero and villain during Gokul Asthami in Mumbai last year when there was no hero, and there was no producer either. I shot it at my own expense because I needed the sequence in my film. I was to shoot it during Gokul Asthami in 2009 but because of Swine Flu, Gokul Asthami was banned that year.”

Nambiar describes Shaitaan as an out and out ensemble film with incidents taken from real life. “We’ve kept it as real as possible. The edginess in the storytelling comes from the fact that these characters are from real life,” he adds.