Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali loves helming films. In fact, he’s glad how being a producer and writer helps him tell more stories to the world. Here, he talks about that, being stereotyped and the positives of OTT. Excerpts:

I have been producing films for the last three and a half years. I make movies at the rate of one movie per two years, which has been my average. But I think of stories at the rate of one story every few months. So, just by mathematics, we know that I will not be able to make all the films that I think of or want to make, if I direct them. The next best thing to do is to produce them and also have some sort of creative supervision, so I’m still able to tell those stories.

I like to make all the stories that come to me naturally. When I made Highway (2014) or Jab We Met (2007), I didn’t think of them as love stories while writing or making them. I think it is the audience that decides what genre a movie or director belongs to. If a certain type of movie is liked, then it’s good for me. She and Dr Arora are very different from the ones that people have seen me making. I hope to make different kinds of films.

The good thing about the web space is that there’s no limit in terms of duration. If you have a longer story, you can make a web show. I could have never make She as a film, as it needed a long duration. When shows started getting made, I thought, ‘Yes, I can make that into a show because it’s more like a character study and less like a plot-oriented story’. It just won’t fit into two hours.