At a producer's house, director Ram Gopal Varma met a man named Haneef, who had been in prison for five years after the 1993 Bombay bombings. He was a close aide of gangster Dawood Ibrahim. Varma started talking to Haneef out of curiosity and his "obsession with the criminal psyche", who told him how the underworld operated. During that time, the media was circulating stories about the conflict between Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan, who had a fallout and wanted to kill each other, thus giving Varma the idea for "Company". During his research for "Satya" (1998), Varma found out several things he could not incorporate into one film, especially the police procedures, because there was too much information.