Saurabh Shukla

Shukla's biggest break came when he co-wrote the script for Ram Gopal Varma's 1998 cult classic Satya and played the role of gangster Kallu Mama in the film.[6] He won the Star Screen Award for Best Screenplay alongside Anurag Kashyap.

"Why do I make realistic films, like Satya? Because that's the kind of films I like to do. Capturing reality is very difficult and challenging," he said in a 2000 interview to Rediff.com, making it clear that he prefers realism in his scripts. In the same interview he also talked about his preferred genre of film making – comedy:

If you carefully see my work, it is all [comedy]. We usually categorize subjects as comedy and serious. But there is more than just this. Like when we laugh, we sometimes also cry. There can be certain viciousness to this action if there is too much of it. It is the same with romance, which gets too much after a point. There is always a comic element in every situation.[7]

In 2003, he wrote the screenplay for Calcutta Mail. He received his first award for this film, the Zee Cine Award for Best Screenplay. In 2008, he acted in his first international film, the Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire, as the character Constable Srinivas. In 2013, he appeared as policeman Sudhanshu Dutta in Barfi!, a film through which director Anurag Basu and co-actor Ranbir Kapoor, he said, "revived [him] as an actor".[8]