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Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap opened up about moving out of Mumbai, having grown tired and depressed by the Hindi film industry’s obsession with box office and the declining quality of its productions. Anurag said that he has quit drinking after moving to the South, and has never written as much as he is now. In an interview, he said that he couldn’t handle the negativity around him in Mumbai, and that he was beginning to attract saviour figures who took it upon themselves to right his career. He also claimed that people had stopped meeting him because they felt that he was spiralling out of control.
Appearing on Sudhir Srinivasan’s YouTube channel, he said that Bollywood folks started believing that he was going ‘the RGV way’. “I went into a depression. I’ve come out of it. I’m enjoying myself now. One thing I did was, I stopped watching Hindi films. I started watching a lot of films from first-time filmmakers, I started watching a lot of Malayalam films,” he said. Anurag revealed that working on the film Rifle Club changed his life, because it reconnected him with a community of filmmakers.
“Hindi filmmakers have been avoiding me, because they think I’m bad new, because they think I have no filter and I talk. They think that if they get associated with me, they might not get (to work with) some studio or somebody else will get upset. And I’ve come to a place that I’m inspired by, and people have so much love for me,” he said, adding that the love he received in the South made him wonder what he was doing in Mumbai. “Why am I in a place where I’m being told that people are talking about your alcoholism, people are talking about your depression, people are saying you’re losing your way. They’re trying to be my saviour and telling me what I must do to save me from myself,” he said.
Anurag said that he stopped drinking ‘automatically’ after moving to the South. “I don’t have to deal with people. Automatically, I started exercising. Automatically, I started writing,” he said. Anurag had previously lashed out at the Hindi industry for becoming too consumed by finances, and had said that actors he used to collaborate with in the past have started ghosting him. He also opened up about facing mental health challenges following the abrupt shelving of his passion project, the series Maximum City, which he was developing for Netflix. Several of his films were also stuck after having been completed. However, one of them, Nishaanchi, is set for release on September 19. He also has the completed films Bandar and Kennedy lined up, waiting for release.
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