Dev Patel reflects on 'one hell of a journey' directing Monkey Man, his first feature film

When British actor Dev Patel — famous for his roles in Slumdog Millionaire and Lion — started working on his first film as director, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. "We blagged to our financiers that we'd been there and seen how amazing the facilities were — I'd never been — and we managed to resurrect the film," Patel says. Patel says Monkey Man was a small-budget film, "so to wear a cast and have to paint that out throughout the film would have been impossible". Much of the action takes place in the King's Club, an elite private members' club that Patel says represents "the microcosm of India". Patel says he "tried to bake in Indian philosophical notions" into Monkey Man's narrative.