After an apprenticeship at the important studio Bombay Talkies, Kapoor took the remarkable step of beginning his own production company at the age of twenty-four. His first film as director and producer starred himself as a young man haunted by a lost childhood love and willing to risk disinheritance by becoming a stage actor instead of becoming a lawyer like his father. Aag finds Kapoor already employing the baroque shadows that would become the signature style of his black-and-white films as a director. This use of chiaroscuro reveals his apprenticeship at Bombay Talkies, whose leaders had received training at Germany’s fabled Ufa studio before the war.