Though it’s been over 21 years since she made her debut, Bollywood star Katrina Kaif still believes that she has a long way to go and a lot more to do. Currently, she is busy pursuing her favourite directors to work with her, and recently crossed off Sriram Raghavan from her list after their first venture together, the noir Merry Christmas, hit the screens earlier this year.

Also starring Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathy, the film was based on Frédéric Dard’s French novel Le Monte-charge (Bird in a Cage). “I was in love with the book. It was everything you wanted in this space.

It was tender, poetic, it had that very mysterious Hitchcockian quality to it. It had drama, it had mystery, it had murder, it had everything in the most unique and novel way,” Kaif told Variety during a recent chat.

Heaping praise on Raghavan, she said, “There’s a certain rawness and realness to the characters in his films when you watch them on screen. They’re very flawed, they’re very imperfect, but there’s like a tangible, humane quality about them. They feel very real, like I’ve seen this person or I know this person. He has a certain grip on having something relatable to what he depicts on screen, even though sometimes the situations are so outlandish, but yet the characters are so you can feel you can understand what they’re going through, and you relate to their emotions.”