The last two years have been tough for debutant director Bejoy Nambiar, as his script faced countless rejections and he went through a difficult divorce with theatre actress Juhi Babbar. A lot rides on the release of Shaitan this week, including the possibility of moving the headquarters of Getaway Productions from his chaotic bedroom into a real office

It's one in the afternoon and it appears Bejoy Nambiar has just woken up. Unsupervised, a maid is doing a hurried job of sweeping the living room. The room is spacious, with a life-size sculpture of Krishna sitting at the centre.

There are family photographs and a gramophone placed trendily on a showcase, but like on a messy morning, also visible are a DVD player's tangled wires, an unused treadmill, and a weighing scale shoved underneath a table.

I ask for Nambiar, and she points to a room in a corner, as though Nambiar were a schoolboy whose friends keep trooping in, and he needn't be informed beforehand about the people trying to meet him.

Inside the room, the director, in shorts and T-shirt, is sitting with his feet up on a chair. He is puffy-eyed from a late night edit and is yet to take a shower. Next to him, sits Natasha Sahgal, the director of behind-the- scenes footage (which will make its way into the DVD).

She looks no older than 18, but is a former journalist, who is working on a film for the first time. In fact, as Nambiar points out, a large number of his technicians and actors are newcomers and friends.

The bedroom is small and chaotic, and as it turns out, it is from here that Nambiar plotted his entry into Bollywood. With a computer to surf the Internet, and another two for editing, this is Nambiar's Getaway Productions' office.

He has edited all his short films from here, and a major chunk of the behind-the-scenes section of Shaitan too. For the rest of the editing, Sahgal used to visit a friend's home because she did not own a Mac computer. If Shaitan does well, Getaway Productions might move into a new office, she says.

In fact, a lot hinges on Shaitan. With a budget of Rs 4.5 crore, midget-like in comparison with other Bollywood biggies, it will test if Nambiar has been able to make the transition from short films to a feature. "I wrote this film in 2007, but for a long period, no one believed in it and me, " he says.

Nambiar studied business administration first, in Mumbai and later in the UK, and even helped his father with the family export business.

But all along, he made time to dabble in direction; first, as a 19 year old with theatre, and later, with short films. On his return from the UK, he started making short films with his own money. One of them called Reflections, won him accolades on the festival circuit.

It was an eight minute-long film, which starred Malayalam superstar Mohanlal Viswanathan Nair, and dealt with the subject of happiness, with Nair as a nameless drifter, imagining himself in other people's situations and reflecting on how he would behave.

The short film helped Nambiar get work as an assistant director with Mani Ratnam in Guru and Raavan, and won him the Sony Pix's Gateway award for short films in 2008.

"Gateway was supposed to be my big break. According to the competition, Ashok Amritraj (American producer and former professional tennis player) was to produce a feature film I'd make. We met in the US and he showed interest, but later backed out, " he shrugs.

This was, however, going to be just one of many rejections. Nambiar started doing the rounds of producers in Mumbai. "I took my story to every producer for the next one-and-a-half years, and even to the so-called poster boys and doyens of independent cinema, but everyone kept me waiting and later dropped the idea."

Producers would tell Nambiar, it's a dark script. "Thrillers don't work... they would ask me about the last thriller which did well, and all they could think of was Race, which was not even a thriller."

It was only late in 2010, when Nambiar started shooting, using his own funds, that director-producer Anurag Kashyap came on board as producer. But Nambiar says he never lost hope all through the waiting period.

"Even if one producer would not work out, there was another I had my hopes pinned on. I never learnt filmmaking in a school. It was something I was extremely passionate about and I strived hard to get a break.

I just had to make this film." While Nambiar says he does not think he will continue to make thrillers, it is the 2007 Adnan Patrawala murder case in Mumbai that got him interested in making this film.

Patrawala, a 16 year-old boy, was allegedly kidnapped by five youngsters and later killed when they feared they would be caught. "That particular case started as my moot point. Unlike cases before, it got so much media coverage that it led to kidnappers panicking, and killing the boy, " he says.

"Later as the script developed, more such cases were revealed, and I kept incorporating bits in my script."

Apart from last minute touch-ups to Shaitan, Nambiar is spending the week before its release promoting the film -- primarily on the Internet, because this is where he believes his target audience lies, and on TV (he is currently UTV World Movies' filmmaker of the month.) As we conclude the interview, Nambiar explains that his films will not necessarily be non-commercial but will always be content-heavy, not formulaic.

This is apparent when he talks about a recent episode involving someone from the marketing team of his film.

"He called me and said, 'Your songs are nice, but you should have had something like Bhaag DK Bose (from Delhi Belly).'" Nambiar shrugs his shoulders, as I smile to that. "What can I say to that? Why do I need a song that has to become a rage, or have some needless item number?"