Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
An alumnus of the Ram Gopal Varma school of cinema, Anurag Kashyap, much like his mentor, has made a lasting impact on the film industry and is regarded as one of the most influential Indian filmmakers of the modern era. Though he has been in the industry for 26 years, Anurag is still a ‘struggling’ filmmaker who must put in significant effort to get a project greenlit, primarily due to his unconventional filmmaking style and the fact that, although his films often receive critical acclaim, many haven’t performed well at the box office.
The filmmaker recently took a trip down memory lane, reflecting on various projects of his that were shelved, with the web series Maximum City being one of the hardest to let go. He also revealed that his neo-noir thriller Kennedy was born from the remnants of a project stalled in the 2000s. Recalling that in 2003, director Sudhir Mishra had hired him to write a project titled Uss Raat Achanak, which was to star Sanjay Dutt and Tejaswini Kolhapure, with Dutt’s character inspired by an ’80s cop named Uday Shetty, Anurag said that the character stayed with him long after the film was shelved.
“I very taken in by the character; he intrigued me a lot and I always wanted to use him. I even tried to many times. I once convinced (cinematographer-turned-filmmaker) Rajeev Ravi that I’ll write it and asked him to make it in Malayalam. In different scenarios and different times I was trying to put in Uday Shetty. And then Covid and the lockdown happened. During that time, I wrote Maximum City, spending one and a half years writing the three-part, nine-hour thing. But six days prior to starting our prep, it got shelved and I was told it was not going to happen. The reaction to that was, I sat down, poured out everything I was feeling and what came out was the first draft of Kennedy,” he said while appearing on the Cinema House segment organised by the G5A Foundation.
Anurag also shared how the repeated shelving of projects, particularly Maximum City, has affected him. “Inside, I’ve been dying for last four-five years. I wanted to make Maximum City, but I couldn’t. At the same time, two other scripts that I wrote, one in 2016 and the other in 2019-20, I am making both the films this year. While I have already finished one, the other is inching closer to completion. It’s almost like, I was finding my way back and Kennedy was that door through which I needed to step out. While finishing Kennedy, I did not know what to do next. I did not want to do another film that was forced on to me or that I was doing under some pressure.”
“So, I just acted the last whole year. I was like, I will act and make money, but I will not do a film that I don’t want to do or that’s not totally under my control. And then, everything started to happen after Kennedy and this year, we have been shooting non-stop. By December we’ll have three films done. I have gone through this phase three times in my life now,” he said, adding that filmmakers worldwide face similar challenges, citing Francis Ford Coppola’s struggles with Megalopolis as an example.
Anurag previously said that Netflix had backed out of his adaptation of writer Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City following the Tandav controversy, following which streamers in India resolved to play it safe and changed a lot of their policies.
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
