When I was abroad, Sanjay Gupta used to send recommendations to watch things on YouTube. He was a good friend and a very good soul. I never expected him to go so early in life. I enjoyed making Kaabil with him. When he narrated the script to Hrithik [Roshan] and me, I shook hands with him then and there and said we were going ahead with it.

Sanjay was a good technician and a capable director. He never did anything without asking me while filming Kaabil. After the shoot got over, I told him I couldn’t have made this film as well as he had. I never once had to go on the sets.

He discussed everything before we shot. I was going to give him my next film whenever I thought of making one. He had been sitting on two or three subjects for two years, but we could not lock any of them. He had written the script for Kaabil 2. Hrithik and I had heard the script and liked it. We were working on it when, all of a sudden, this happened.

Sanjay was the second director [after Anurag Basu] to work with our banner. He was a commercial director with sound technical knowledge, including shot-taking and lighting. When I saw the first copy of Kaabil, I told him, ‘You have far exceeded my imagination’.

He also sat with me on the third and fourth instalments of Krrish. We were close and practically met every day. He was an all-rounder in filmmaking. We would script together without any arguments, very calmly. If something was not good enough, he would come back with another idea, or I would. There was no ego between us. He would explain to actors what he wanted from them and [find a way] to extract what he envisioned.

Sanjay was attached to his team and was like family to everybody. Besides being a good director and technician, he was a very good human being, a good friend, family member, father and husband — rare qualities, but Sanjay had all of them.