From being a screenwriter in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998) to turn director with Black Friday (2007), Anurag Kashyap has come a long way. From powerful scripts and realistic stories, his movies have been appreciated by the critics and audiences alike. With movies such as Dev D (2009), Gulaal (2010), That Girl In Yellow Boots (2011) and the Gangs of Wasseypur series (2012), to his credit, Anurag says that he has evolved over the years. “The young me was idealistic and angry, but then I found sarcasm and humour.” The director, who has always been vocal about his opinions, says that he now has better “political awareness and has grown up in time.”
The 47-year-old filmmaker, who has written scripts of movies such as Nayak (2001), Yuva (2004), Water (2005) and Udaan (2010) says that he is already dealing with mid-life crisis. “I am reaching mid-life now and the crisis has kicked in big time. It has started reflecting in my work, my stories and the choice of things that I am trying to do. Now, I think I am getting more condense and complex. But there is also simplifying the complexity — the ideas are complex, but I am able to simplify them. Earlier, I wouldn’t care about this.”
It is safe to say that Anurag has always maintained a good balance between his male and female characters in his films. Ask him if the quirky side to his female characters come to him naturally, and he says, “Yes, they just come to me naturally. I usually write about characters that I see, or are around me or that I have read about. Andhar se hi aata hai.”
So does he care about the numbers at the box office? “Everyone cares about numbers. Over the years, I have understood that I don’t want to dumb down to reach out to maximum, but I want to reach out to enough that it sustains me. But I definitely care about numbers.”
The filmmaker, who has paired with Audible for a podcast titled Suno, says that regional movies have changed in time. The screenwriter for Moothon (2019) says, “They are way more braver than us. When you look at filmmakers like Ashiq Abu, Rajeev Ravi, Geethu Mohandas and Lijo, the kind of work they are doing is on another level. The way Geethu has handled the subject of Moothon, I don’t think any male director would have been able to do it. The rawness of the world of Mumbai that she shows is much more raw than I have seen anybody do it. I wish I knew any of the south Indian languages mein udhar jaake banata movies.”
About how the digital world has changed the industry, Anurag says, “For me all these new platforms are a boon. My primary job is to tell stories and now I can tell it in uninhibited way in a world that suddenly gone so moral. I am very happy about OTT platforms not being censored and I would never want it to be censored. I am totally anti-censor.”
