With the year's first major release days away from hitting theatres, who better to talk about Mani Ratnam's Guru than the film's titular leading man, Abhishek Bachchan himself?

Without further adieu, here's the hero's take:

"On face value, Guru is the story of Gurukant Desai, the protagonist of the film, who I play. It is the life story of this one character. We meet him at the age of 15-16 and stay with him till the end of his life.

I personally feel the movie is about a dream, a dream that I would like to believe that the majority of our country has. His is a special story of that one character who makes his dream into a reality.

When Mani first came to me with the idea, we were already working on a different script and he had had a change of heart. He said 'I feel like making this film and this is very interesting, let's do this film.'

As an actor you cant find a more interesting, exciting script to do, because well it's almost like a biopic. But initially I was scared, because it was going to be challenging. You know when Mani comes to you, he means tough, he will not give you an easy film. And once you are on the set, he will really make your role tougher by the demands he makes in terms of performance.

I was excited because I knew Mani was talking about a wider message. Not just one character, he was very conscious about this being the story of an everyday boy with a large dream, and how he sets about through his talent and dedication achieving that.

I latched on to that one emotion Mani was very insistent upon when we set about making the film. It is a movie about hope. Apart from just celebrating its one character, the film tells everybody that if there is a will there is a way. That is what I take back from Guru.

Every film I do is a landmark film. I think it is very important to an actor to think like that because we should not prioritise our work like that. But when you work with Mani, you know it's going to be special. The last time I worked with him was Yuva, which went on to bring a lot of changes for me and taught me a lot.

This time around I think Mani has taught me even more. So in terms of what I learnt, in terms what Mani means to me as a director, it is truly a landmark for me.

I have worked in Hindi films with big star casts, budgets but this film is big in a different way --although we do have a huge production, huge star cast, group of wonderful actors and great technicians -- the idea of the film is very big. I think the character Mani gave me is larger than life, and so I could call it my biggest film yet.

A lot of work went into the character, obviously emanating from the fact that Mani is immensely well prepared when he comes to meet you on a script level. The greatest thing is that he is very clear on exactly what he wants to see.

We set about working on the film's look, got in some special effects makeup artistes from India and abroad. We actually had them flown down, did a bit of prosthetics makeup, a lot of makeup tests -- although we had Sundays off, we utilised those days. Even while shooting we used to keep tweaking, to get the look right.

Mani has an obsession for making things real. So he definitely felt using too much makeup would disconnect the audience from character. So you want to use as much makeup possible to age, and when you see it you feel 'oh, you could have done a little more, you could have added grey to the hair a little bit more, you could have added more weight' but he was clear.

That clarity is nice because I think the ageing is minimal, superficially. Less is more, and the rest is the performance, the way they've been shot, that was nice because it is more realistic.

Yes, there is a lot of preparation, a lot of hard work, but it is greatly complemented by Rajiv (Menon, cinematographer) and Mani because they also shot it in a particular way sometimes to try and hide a few things and sometimes to accentuate the flaws.

This is my second film with Madras Talkies and in characteristic form I've moved in, I worked with the production unit before in Yuva, and am very close to and fond of them.

Mani is Mani, is Mani, is Mani.. You know he is somebody I hold very dear to me. I am very glad we worked in another film together. The friendship continued after Yuva, but the want of an actor to work with a director was always there and I wanted to do another film with him.

Rajiv Menon is actually Ravi's boss, (Ravi K Chandran shot Yuva) and I call him exactly that. Rajiv shot Guru and no way is there a better cinematographer in the world. Ravi trained under him. According to me, he is very humble. I really believe, from the 30-odd films I've done and the innumerable films I've seen, that there isn't a better cinematographer.

The way he sets up the shots and the way he understands cinema, its truly so wonderful to have a cinematographer who is not just the eyes of your director, but also the ears and much more.

What I love the most about Rajiv is that he is always improvising. At times its irritating when in the middle of a take, he changes the entire lighting setup.

But then he told me something wonderful. He said, 'if you can change your dialogues why cant I change my lighting?' That's very fair. He's truly a master of his art. I really hope he doesn't go for direction again, and sticks to cinematography.

In Guru there is no one song that stands out, but the entire soundtrack is great and it complements the film brilliantly. It's very tough to choose just one song. They all are unique in their own way, special in their own way, the way we shot just the song itself.

The bhang song we call yamo yamo is a great track, and we had a great time shooting it. Be it Mayya mayya which we shot in an old Byzantine church in Turkey or be Aishwarya's introductory track, or the romantic songs we have shot, they are all unique. They have the unique sound of Mani Ratnam and A R Rahman together, so it's very tough to choose among them.

There were really no easy scenes during this film. It is very tough when you start to shoot. It's very demanding. Mani really used this film to remove all his frustrations about my bad behaviour during his last film. He gave me so much work on the sets I shut up."