India, May 2 -- 1Your novel, The Director (2025), is divided into three parts - Outside, Inside, and After - mimicking the process of movie-making: a film's inception, its production and its afterlife. Was that intentional? Putting in lots of references to moviemaking, including structural ones, was deliberate. It's something that comes naturally to you if you have a main character like (filmmaker GW) Pabst, who was a great storyteller in his own right. As a novelist, I'm interested in the shape the story is taking. So to tell the story of a filmmaker from the 1920s, the German silent-movie era, should not only have the structural but also psychological influences. For example, when Pabst finds himself in tight, dense and dangerous scenes, he imagines himself shooting a movie. 2Do you think authoritarian regimes plant messages in works of art, to leverage these for their own gain? What then becomes the purpose of such art? It is in the nature of art to be a bit problematic. In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant talks about how, when you interact with an artwork, while you can get its aesthetic idea, you can never finish constructing it fully. If there's a clear message that you can draw from an artwork, say, "No more wars", then you're done with that work! That's not how real art works for Kant. It works if you'll never be able to point where exactly this piece of art is telling me what to do. If it's really a great work of art, then there's always more to it. You can say it's my German romanticism, but I love that idea. I find it a good explanation of why an artwork can have multiple messages, because all of them aren't fully extractable because you're never done with a good work of art. That's the difference between a didactical novel and something like a War and Peace, which also tells you that wars are bad but in a much more complex way. 3Such works also speak across time. The compromises Pabst made are also faced by artists today. Yes, there's a relationship with time, especially with moviemaking, which is completely different from dilemmas painters faced, say 300 years ago. Authoritarian states are very interested in movies. So, it's not only the artist who is tempted to compromise, but authoritarian states also are more incentivised to lure artists onto their side. While writing the book, I was only conscious of this situation existing in Nazi Germany. Though I was being shaped by what was happening, say, in Russia, or during (US President Donald) Trump's first term, I wasn't aware if my work would have a contemporary relevance. But that was back then. Now I feel it does....