Meghna Gulzar has a release riding this week. Daayra, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran, opens September 18. But in a conversation for Indian Express's Expresso series, she spent most of her time looking backward, running through the actors who've passed through her sets over two decades, and what directing each of them actually felt like from her chair.

The Irrfan Khan story is the one that lands hardest. Gulzar directed him in Talvar, and by her own account, she barely had to. "I really had nothing to do. Everything he did, he made me look good," she said. That's about as clean a compliment as a director can hand an actor. But she added a caveat that's stayed with her since. Talvar was built around competing versions of the same crime, and Gulzar admitted she still doesn't know where Irrfan himself landed. "I still don't know which side of Talvar's perspective he believes or agrees with," she said.

On Kareena and Prithviraj, her current leads, Gulzar was almost as brief. "The easy part has been their proficiency as actors. I don't have to talk about that. There was very little instruction required," she said, adding that both had taken their characters further than she'd written them on the page. She called that part gratifying. She also called the trust they'd placed in her "very scary," which is a more honest admission than directors usually make in a press cycle.

Vicky Kaushal, who she's worked with twice now on Raazi and Sam Bahadur, gets described almost like a shorthand partnership. "I don't need to complete a sentence. He knows what I am going to say," Gulzar said, before conceding that finding him a role bigger than Sam Bahadur is going to be a problem going forward.

Deepika Padukone, her Chhapaak lead, comes off as the most internally demanding of the lot. "She'll never stay on the surface. She will go beneath the surface of the character, of the scene, of the story," Gulzar said, throwing in that Deepika might out-OCD her, which given Gulzar's own reputation for precision is saying something.

Alia Bhatt's Raazi shoot, on the other hand, sounds like it came with an occupational hazard. Gulzar recalled the running sequence where Alia kept getting hurt take after take, calling her "spontaneous and instinctive to a point where she can hurt herself."

Tabu and Sushmita Sen, her Filhaal collaborators, land at opposite ends of the difficulty scale. Tabu, already an established senior actor by then, wasn't easy to direct precisely because of that seniority. Sushmita, by contrast, gets the simplest verdict of the whole interview. "There was nothing difficult with her," Gulzar said.

With Daayra a day away from theatres, the interview reads less like promotion and more like a filmmaker taking stock. What she says about Kareena and Prithviraj this weekend, once the film is actually out and being judged, is the part still pending.