Fans are your greatest enemies because they tend to bracket you. And the moment someone expects I should do something, I break out. I often tell fans who say, ‘Make a ‘Gulal 2’ or ‘Gangs 3,’ that I am living my dream, not theirs.
In ‘Gangs of Wasseypur,’ I wanted to take violence forward and play it up.
Where I come from, a lot of people didn’t have money, but they didn’t have gangs or drugs either.
In Chicago, you have an absence of strong family units, and that absence gets filled by gangs. You have a failure in the school system, after-school programs and other social programs to help keep kids off the streets. Amnesty International speaks to that in some way, by keeping these issues in the forefront.
Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.
Whether it was ‘Gangs Of Wasseypur’ or whether it’s ‘LSTCK,’ the characters are real, and when you see them on screen, you can identify with them.
There was the ‘Cosby Show’ in America in the 1980s, which was a doctor in a beautiful Brownstone middle-class house. We just haven’t created a role like that in the U.K.; it’s always gangs and crime. We need to be brave.
I did ‘Gangs of New York’ with Martin Scorsese, and they used to call me ‘Little Joe Pesci’ on the set.
When I did ‘Gangs,’ I didn’t have a manager, a PR or stylist.
As much as I dislike the suggestion of single solutions to complex problems, jobs are as close as we will get to a single, effective answer to the enormous problem of gangs.
Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that’s what happens at Homeboy Industries.
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