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Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur is known as one of the most significant films of the 21st century in Indian cinema, and the crew and cast that worked on the film has often spoken about how the movie was made with a limited budget. In a recent interview, Zeishan Quadri, who played Definite in the film, and was the story writer of Gangs of Wasseypur, shared that he was paid only Rs 5 lakh as the writer. He shared that he was promised that he would be paid separately for the second part but since the production house funding the film backed out a week before the shoot, there was no money left and he wasn’t paid.
In a chat with Siddharth Kannan on his YouTube channel, Zeishan was asked if Anurag wasn’t as interested in making the film after the initial pitch. To this, Zeishan jumped in Anurag’s defense and said that the director was on board when he first heard the concept note. “When I met him for the first time and he read the concept note of 7-8 pages, he said then and there that I will make the film. He said, ‘I will make it 100 percent, you don’t worry about it.’ He gave me his number on the spot. Until then, I didn’t even have his phone number,” he recalled.
Zeishan Quadri said that when he first reached Anurag Kashyap’s office after this meeting, he saw the director getting out of an auto rickshaw and wondered if he had attached himself to the right director. “I saw Anurag getting out of an auto rickshaw and I wondered if this man doesn’t have any money, how will he make my film? It’s all about perception,” he said. It was during this meeting that Anurag told him to write everything that he knew about the world of Wasseypur.
Zeishan also shared that he had placed one condition in front of Anurag before giving him the script, which the director instantly agreed upon. “I said, ‘There’s a character called Definite, I want to play that. That’s my only condition. If you say yes, then I will write the script,’” he recalled.
Zeishan Quadri shared that at the time he was paid Rs 5 lakh for the film’s story. “I got Rs 5 lakh and I was told that I would be paid for part 2 but that didn’t happen,” he said and added, “Because there was no money. One week before the shoot of the second part, UTV backed out saying we won’t make this film.” After UTV’s exit, Viacom entered the picture but by then, they knew that the film had to be made in limited means.
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“There was no money then and I didn’t need it either. I was more interested in getting the film made. And not just me, everyone said the same thing because the film was important for everyone. Everyone got paid very little for that film,” he said and recalled that there was one vanity van for everyone on that film. “There was one vanity van. We were living in a lodge during the shoot. Someone was complaining on another shoot that there’s no hot water here and I was telling them that during Gangs of Wasseypur, we would only get water from 5-7 am and after that, there would be no water,” he recalled.
Since the release of the two films in 2012, Anurag Kashyap has said that he felt “cheated” by the production house as they continue to say that Gangs of Wasseypur films did not make any money. In a previous chat with Pinkvilla, he said that the two films were made on a combined budget of Rs 16.5 crore, and the studio claims that they suffered a loss of Rs 8 crore. “Nobody got any money from that film. And on that film, one studio earned so much money. They ask us, ‘Extend our rights, let’s do a spin-off’. I asked them, ‘Why do you want to make a sequel of a flop film? The studio has cheated its creators and the actors, and everybody involved with the film,” he said.
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