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Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, regarded as a maverick in the independent cinema landscape of India, reflected on his journey and said that he cannot predict where the industry is headed. “I’m not Nostradamus,” he said in a new interview on the sidelines of the ongoing Berlin Film Festival, adding that he is willing to go backwards to go forward. He said that when things get really bad for him, he reminds himself where he came from. Anurag also said that he has more privileges than several independent filmmakers navigating the industry today, and that’s what he’d rather focus on instead of all the hurdles in his way.
Speaking to Forbes, Anurag was asked about the current landscape, where audiences only seem to be interested in watching big-budget spectacles in cinemas, and would rather wait to catch smaller films when they land on streaming. “I have stopped looking into the future… I can talk about the problems that I face, or that other filmmakers face, I can talk about solutions that I can figure out, but I can’t talk about the future. There are a lot of new things now, like short-format… I wanted to be a filmmaker because I like watching films on the big screen. I watch films at festivals because I hate interruptions caused by intervals back home, and everyone posturing about ‘this is bad for health, this is bad for mind’. It destroys my movie-watching experience.”
Anurag said that despite the challenges that he faces, he has it way easier than so many other filmmakers in the country. “What if everything goes wrong, what if everything fails? I’ll go back to exactly where I came from. That first day in the city, wanting to make films, standing on the street with a suitcase. But I don’t go further back. I have an absolute love for cinema, and that is regardless… I know that I want to make films all my life. All the other things I did along the way was to support other filmmakers with distinctive voices. If there are more voices, I will have the longevity to keep making films. There more independent voices are there, the easier it will be for me to make films. When I started, there was no ground to play on.”
He added, “Why compare myself to those filmmakers who are making multi-million-dollar movies? Why not compare myself to (an independent filmmaker) and see how privileged I am.” Anurag said that 15 years ago, he could’ve offered strategies, but, he said, “The world has changed a lot, and now I’m back to finding my place in it.” Anurag is one of the producers of the Kannada-language film Tiger’s Pond, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. His last film, Kennedy, remains unreleased despite a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023.
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