The past circles back in Batra’s newest film

I don’t know if that does appeal to me so much. When I was making Lunchbox, I wrote on the first page of the script, “Less is more.” I underlined it. The crew and the actors would make fun of me: “Here comes less-is-more.” It became a running joke. But I don’t want to say that ambiguity is my forte.

We live in an age when people are seeing everything. They don’t want to feel things. They want to see things. When you’re directing or writing something, or even editing it – editing is like rewriting – you’ve got to be very conscious about “What do I want people to feel here?” Not “What do I want people to see?” And what is it that you want people to feel here, with The Sense of an Ending?

The feeling I got when I read the book, and when I was making the movie – I just felt that everything ends badly, invariably. Youth goes away. We love people and then they leave us. That’s the whole point.

Nothing has a happy ending. But it’s still a gift to be here. That question – why is it a gift to be here? Why don’t more people commit suicide? – that is the conundrum of life. Nick and I were just trying to present that question. You’ve said that adapting the book turned out to be a bigger challenge than you expected. How so?

Julian was generous. When I met him the first time, he said, “Go ahead and betray me.” I was thinking about what that means. It also means, “Don’t disappoint me.” It means, “Don’t just take my book and make it into a movie. Do something with it.” Those are great marching orders. Did that give you a kind of licence?

Absolutely. The hardest thing about adapting it was that the book is basically one man’s interior monologue with an audience. We fleshed out certain relationships, with Tony’s ex-wife, for instance.

We created a relationship with Tony’s daughter, out of air, to frame the story with.

The book has a part one, set in the past, and a part two, set in the present. We subsumed part one within part two, creating the structure of the film in the editing. Were you caught off guard by the success of The Lunchbox?

Maybe I haven’t experienced a whole lot of it, but I think that’s the nature of success. If it doesn’t catch you off guard, then there’s something wrong with you.

The Lunchbox was a very small movie, very difficult, sewn together with European government funds, grants from Germany and France, a little equity from India and a lot of donated time from people in America.

I had spent a lot of my twenties trying to get a movie made that never got made, but I made a lot of relationships through that process. Basically, every friend I had in the world contributed something to The Lunchbox. You were recently named one of 10 directors to watch by Variety, along with Barry Jenkins of Moonlight and other rising stars. Is the pressure on now?

I take it in stride. What else can you do? This is not an easy job, in many ways.

It’s a real privilege to be doing this – telling people what you want and trying to get it out of them. It doesn’t get any better than that. But it also doesn’t get easier because of an honour. – Washington Post