Teja coming back with fresh faces - TeluguPeople.com News

Hyderabad: Teja can tell an actor when he sees one; even a picture will do. 'I can tell if someone can be a good actor by just looking at their picture,' he says nonchalantly. That's not all. He can also tell if an applicant has applied before.

'I can tell if I've seen the application before,' he says. Apparently he gets a lot of repeats. 'I would have screened three-and-a-half-lakh applications over the last decade of which at least a lakh would be repetitions,' he says.

He has conducted many talent hunts and made stars out of unknown people. Uday Kiran, Nitin, Navdeep and Kajal Aggarwal are all his discoveries. He's currently sifting through piles of portfolio shots to zero in on the cast for his next film.

'I need 42 actors,' he says and remarks that he is quite happy with the applications on his table.

'The quality of applications we have received this time is great. Usually in a set of 80,000 applications we would receive around 10-15 female applicants. This time we have around 800 of them,' he shares.

He makes no bones about his penchant to work with new talent. 'I also started out wanting to make movies with stars, but it is hard to convince a star and I still had to prove myself, so the newcomers were my only option, so it's not because I want to provide a platform for talented artistes. Mahesh Babu acted in Nijam but that's only after I had proven myself as a successful director,' he says bluntly.

It is bit of a second coming for Teja, having been away from the business for over three years. His last film Keka released in 2008 and it did not fare too well at the box office. But his last two years were spent in emotional turmoil as he lost his three-year-old son Aaroh in March this year to a rare congenital disease.

'I had to choose between my son and films,' he shares. He took his son to Germany, China and America for treatment. He was showing signs of improvement but suddenly collapsed.

He's back to work now but doesn't look at it as a means of dealing with the pain. 'The memories will remain no matter what. I am doing films because this is what I do,' he says.

As always, Teja is trying out something new this time. 'I am trying out a new genre of filmmaking. The film is going to be full of tension and at the same time it will be a comedy. It has a love story thrown into it as well. Nobody has tried something like this before,' he explains. The film is set to hit the floors on September 10.

Teja began working in films since he was eight. His reasons for getting into filmmaking were very existential. 'I had to fill my stomach so I started working,' he says bluntly. Teja lost his parents as a child. He ran away from his uncle's home to work as a truck cleaner earning Rs2 a day.

'I do not look down upon any job. I did whatever came my way with total dedication,' he explains. He soon found work as a waiter at a restaurant and later joined a film studio as an errand boy.

Teja had a penchant for telling stories to his colleagues while doing odd jobs on movie sets. He caught the eye of an assistant director who promised to pay him a monthly salary of Rs1,500 if he joined him and worked on his film.

'The offer was too good to resist. I took up the project giving up my job at the studio,' he shares. Ram Gopal Varma was the assistant director and the film Shiva turned out to be a blockbuster and Teja worked as a small time assistant on the film.

Teja then worked with RGV as a cinematographer on films like Raat, Antham and Money. He also worked as cinematographer for 30 Bollywood films, the most notable of th'em being Aamir Khan's Ghulam.

He ran into producer Ramoji Rao one day who told him to come up with a storyline. 'I became a filmmaker because of one accidental meeting. I made Chitram, which went on to be a huge hit,' he recalls.

Teja believes his life was much more exciting back when he was struggling. 'I think my life has started stagnating after becoming a director. Back then it was so much more exciting with the constant learning and growing from one menial job to another,' he says signing off.