It was on 3 July 3 1998 that 'Satya', Ram Gopal Varma's Hindi-language crime film, hit the screens. After this masterpiece, many aspiring writers and directors were never the same. Their thinking changed forever. At least, they aspired to change their thinking.

RGV talks about an accident that gave birth to the monstrous entertainer. "It suddenly struck the day a gangster was killed by another gangster that we always hear about gangsters only when they either kill or when they die. But what do they do in between? That was the first thought of mine which eventually resulted in Satya," the director says.

"While being in that frame of mind, I saw some photographs in a newspaper of arrested gangsters covered with black cloth on their head. Seeing their thin hands and mostly lean frames, Nothing about them looked like how Bollywood portrays the bad guys. They are like any other ordinary people. The guy walking on the road could be a gangster. Even the guy living next door could be a gangster," Ramu says, giving a glimpse into how the looks of the characters in 'Satya' came to be envisioned.

Almost everything about 'Satya' was based on RGV's personal experience and first-hand observations. The character of Kallu Mama (Saurabh Shukla) was designed keeping in mind an ex-gangster RGV had met. When RGV met this ex-gangster for the first time, he behaved in such a way that the director was expected to feel unease. "Then later on when I met him, he was very friendly and he looked like a different person altogether. Then I realized that the first time I met him he was trying to play up to an image which he thought I had of him because he knew that I knew who he was," RGV reveals.

What about the character Chander (Snehal Dhabi)? He is inspired by a henchman belonging to Arun Gawli's gang. "In every sentence he will use the name of Gawli. So his whole existence was about his awe of Gawli and he doesn’t have any identity for himself. That I took in Chander’s character," RGV says.

In 'Satya', performances were top-notch. "All realistic performances came in because I stopped telling actors what to do. I just wanted them to improvise whatever they feel like. Actors were instructed not to follow written lines but just say whatever they feel like, so most of the times the content was told to them and they kept on improvising and I controlled it in the editing," the director informs.

The film marked the debut of the brilliant Anurag Kashyap. "I went half by instinct and half by Anurag’s manic way of writing highly realistic dialogue which mostly used to happen on location," RGV notes.

Manoj Bajpai, JD Chakravarthy, Saurabh Shukla, Urmila Matondkar, Paresh Rawal and others were part of the cast. Music was by Vishal Bharadwaj and BGM was by Sandeep Chowta. Gerard Hooper, and Mazhar Kamran handled the camera.