Mishra got along superbly with director Vishal Bharadwaj during the shooting. But he admits that he did have an argument with the director.

There was a scene when Kaka finds out that his son Guddu is seeing Abbaji's daughter. Irrfan lets out the secret when the whole family is sitting around. Immediately afterwards, Kaka beats Guddu within an inch of his life.

"The few dialogues that make me realise that Guddu is seeing Abbaji's daughter did not convince me. How can Kaka understand in just a few lines that his son is seeing Abbaji's daughter? I wanted them to increase the dialogues. When we did that scene the first time, it did not work. So we tried again in the evening. I even wrote new dialogues. That's when Pankajji came to my rescue. He told me this script was impeccable and that not even a word should be changed. Vishal had written a great script."

Mishra went on to do the scene as he had narrated in the script and it worked like magic.

That was the tone for all of the film, he says. "Whatever people spoke was actually in the script. Even if they said, 'Huh,' it was written in the script! No one was allowed to improvise. Actors did try to improvise in the beginning but Vishal told them not to.

"There was one toilet scene which was handed over to Naseer and Om to do as they pleased because they were a bit upset that they could not improvise at all.

"When I was working in Rajdhani, I used to improvise a lot because director Tigmanshu encouraged it. So after a year of that, I found it a bit difficult in the beginning [during Maqbool]. I tried to improvise for my first shot, but Vishal instructed me not to," Mishra explains.

The actor, interestingly, is also a lyricist and will pen the lyrics for Tigmanshu Dhulia's The Killing Of The Porn Filmmaker (the cast will be led by Irrfan). Eventually, Mishra hopes to direct his own film.

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