He's one of the most successful producers in the Hindi film industry with a roster of partnerships with filmmakers and actors. From his first production, the dark and witty Being Cyrus (2006), when he was all of 23, to his latest triumph Mimi, Dinesh Vijan has proved that an adept student of cinema with an instinct for talent can go places even if he is the archetypal outsider. Piloting films that have changed people's careers—whether it was Cocktail (2012) for Deepika Padukone, Go Goa Gone (2013) for former producing partner Saif Ali Khan, Badlapur (2015) for Varun Dhawan, or now Mimi for Kriti Sanon—is not an accident, it's an art. Vijan keeps three things in mind when he reads a script: it should have no reference point from the past, it should have an actor in it who is keen to be reinvented and it should have the potential for success at the box office or on streaming platforms. He also learns from his mistakes. "Agent Vinod [2012] taught me how to make Badlapur," he says, "because a director like Sriram Raghavan cannot be made to hold his punches." His own directorial debut, the lavish Raabta (2017), he says, had fallen behind the times. "The country had changed fundamentally in the time it was written and made. Purchasing power had risen, multiplexes had moved to Tier II towns, and people there were hungry for their own stories. They were proud of themselves and their country. That's why Hindi Medium (2017) did so much better than Raabta," he says, apart from the presence of the beloved Irrfan Khan. The son of a transport company owner, Vijan has an array of films lined up thanks to a team of writers and directors he trusts. They cross genres: Shiddat, a love story starring Radhika Madan and Sunny Kaushal; Hum Do Hamare Do, about children adopting parents, with Rajkummar Rao, Kriti Sanon, Paresh Rawal and Ratna Pathak Shah; Dasvi, where Abhishek Bachchan and Nimrat Kaur are brilliant; Bhediya, a horror thriller with Varun Dhawan and Kriti Sanon; and 21, about 1971 war hero Second Lt Arun Khetarpal. If the directors (Sriram Raghavan, Laxman Utekar and Amar Kaushik) and actors (Kriti and Varun) are repeated often, it is no coincidence. "You develop an ecosystem where you organically want to keep working with the same people," he says. Especially, if the end result is a success.

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