ANURAG KASHYAP: ANGRY NO MORE
ONCE KNOWN as Bollywood’s most volatile director, Anurag Kashyap is playing it cool. He swims 80 minutes a day, every day, to get his mind right. He has quit smoking. “The urge after food is killing, though,” he said. At 46, a bit late, he admits, he’s figured out that he doesn’t need to make the world agree with him.
“The moment it happened, all cobwebs vanished. I started concentrating on my work,” said Kashyap, adding that he has never been so efficient. “Look at my social media. There is much less distress, and I have stopped abusing. Now I am speaking my mind only through my work.”
With three major releases slated for the next few months, including his contribution to the Netflix anthology Lust Stories that hit the web on June 15, he’s got plenty to say.
A companion to 2013’s Bombay Talkies, Lust Stories again places a Kashyap short alongside films by Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar. It’s a departure from his preferred genre of hardboiled noir. But he’s excited to see how the audience responds, given how rapidly perceptions about love, sex and relationships are changing in the era of #MeToo.
“Let’s see how women respond to it. Take my word for it, this is by far the best work by Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar,” he said. “What’s most interesting is that the film addresses the fact that lust is beyond just physical. The audience will get to unravel multiple layers in every story.”
Kashyap’s series based on
Vikram Chandra’s thriller Sacred Games hits Netflix on July 6— marking the streaming channel’s biggest bet on India so far. And then Manmarziyan, a love story set in Punjab and starring Abhishek Bachchan, Vicky Kaushal and Taapsee Pannu, hits theatres in September.
The days when Kashyap struggled to bring an arthouse sensibility to the masses are over, says the director, who was so frustrated by the box office failure of Bombay Velvet (2015) that he almost packed up and moved to France—where he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2013. These days, he’s comfortable with the idea that he’s addressing a niche audience, despite the impact films like Paanch (2003, unreleased in India), Black Friday (2007), Ugly (2014) and this year’s Mukkabaaz have had on the industry—partly because that niche is now unquestioned.
His range is remarkable, and he’s not afraid to take risks, whether it’s the strikingly psychedelic Delhi of DevD (2009) or the surreal Shakespearian ‘fool’ character in Gulaal that same year. Such boldness has earned him the admiration of contemporaries like Sudhir Mishra (Dharavi, Chameli, et al), who classes Kashyap among a handful of directors whose worst films are better than the best work of the rest. “I find every movie of his provocative,” Mishra said. But it hasn’t always scored at the box office. “Exhibition remains a perennial problem. Of course, I have to fight less now… the days of Black Friday are over,” Kashyap said, adding that he now has the confidence to reject projects he doesn’t like.
Like the liberating rise of the multiplex, the boom in original productions for web services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime has resulted in new opportunities and an additional way for theatrical releases like That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011), Ugly and Gurgaon (2017) to reach more viewers, he says. He reckons Sacred Games will reach the largest audience he’s ever tapped.
His newfound Zen doesn’t mean everything is copacetic. He still rails against the bean counter mentality of producers, who are these days greenlighting gritty stories set in UP and Bihar on the back of the success of his Gangs of Wasseypur and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara. He hammers “the same set of four-five people who are good with getting sponsorships and extracting government funding” for the proliferation of meaningless film festivals. And he blasts the government’s defanging of the National Film Development Corporation, which once made “fine protest cinema” even as he pooh-poohs industry whingeing about “unsaid censorship”. “Why do we complain so much?” he asked. “Do we have more restrictions than the Iranian film industry? Look at the work being done there. One just needs to devise clever metaphors to say them. I tried that in Mukkabaaz.” Kashyap is mentoring director Tushar Hiranandani for Womaniya on the world’s oldest shooters—Uttar Pradesh-based Chandro Tomar (86) and her sister-in-law, Prakkashi (81). He’s also smiling more often, and laughing at himself for all the worries that have come with being the father of a 17-year-old girl. In other words, he’s not just going with the flow. He’s swimming with it.
‘‘His worst is better than others’ worst films,” says filmmaker Sudhir Mishra