He may have turned 86 last month, but Mrinal Sen, the maverick maestro of Indian cinema, only seems to be getting younger. At least, that?s how the veteran filmmaker ? he has directed 28 feature films, including Ek Din Pratidin, Kharij and Khandahar, and won awards for most ? looks at himself: ?I am growing younger and you should count my age in reverse order.?

For him, cinema and the city of Calcutta are like Siamese twins. ?Calcutta is a city of glaring contrasts and that is me ? restless, nervous, unpredictable, intimidating, infernal; and I have grown in this state of confusion, this chaotic situation.?

?Lord Clive called the city ?the most wicked place in the universe?, Nehru called it ?the city of processions? and Gunter Grass turned it into ?God?s excrement?; I defy these labels and must tell you that Calcutta (never Kolkata for him) excites me, provokes me and gives me a lot of intellectual food. Calcutta irritates me and saddens me; it acts like a stimulant and a provocation.?

Talking about his reaction to the audience, Sen says: ?I like to force the audience to confront issues and questions raised in my films. Since I also give the answers or suggest some answers, a synthesis emerges. My films question the audience. What I have been doing for some time is to keep the ending open. All that we can do is to analyse the situation so that the audience starts asking questions till they find an answer.?

Asked how he serves his time and medium, he replies: ?I still continue to serve my own time, do a kind of introspection, self-searching, self-criticism to be more exact, pulling myself by the hair and making myself stand before the mirror. I identify with the class from which I come. It is the class of the underprivileged. But there again I confront a crisis.?

For him reality is something that cannot be retrieved as it is. ?I have a different take about reality and realism, the central focus of my cinema. My films in general are agit-prop in nature and I continued the trend till I made Ek Din Pratidin, a film about soul-searching and self-criticism.? Sen started a process to find the ?enemy? within, which he deems more important. He adds: ?Now it is much more important to identify the enemy lying within. This is the time for soul-searching because we need to know, after so many years of conflicts and struggles, where we stand as creative directors.?

His understanding of physical reality absorbed in his cinema is different too. ?What you can do is to project your understanding of the reality. In other words, you cannot project a slice of reality physically on the screen. I want to invest the physical reality with my sensibility, my own contemporary sensibility.?

Asked whether he lives in the past, Sen quipped: ?The important thing is to connect the past with the present. Sometimes, an example, minuscule, comes to mind. An incident of no consequence, apparently. But deep within me, it is something that catches me unaware and suddenly opens the door between the past and the present.? About his concept of filmmaking, Sen says he improvises a lot. ?I don?t really know myself what I am going to do. I don’t believe in a rigid script,? adding, ?I am not a Kurosawa, I am not a Satyajit Ray, I am not a Godard, who believes in drawing sketches. I can?t do that. I can?t draw a single line. My films are a kind of thesis.?

Despondent about the current trend of filmmaking, he remarks: ?Most of the current generation of filmmakers go overboard to justify their films, very poor, corny and unimaginative? I don?t see much hope in them.?

Sen has already written the script for his next film: Talking about it, he says: ?It is a film about continuity, relating the past to the present. I still believe poverty, famine, social exploitation, identifying the inner enemy, resistance etc can be subjects of a film. It is a sort of autobiographical film though exactly not so? you may call it a film within films.?