After a protracted battle with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), we catch Anurag Kashyap after the High Court cleared Udta Punjab for release. In the middle of answering a million calls, shooting selfies with a lady, and agreeing to watch the film of a young director, who claims to be Eklavya to Kashyap’s Dronacharya, he gives us time for a long chat the next day.
When we finally sit down to talk, he is anxious, edgy and distracted. There was still a 24-hour wait for the release of the much-talked about film and the Censor certificate is yet to reach him. Nonetheless, he takes a quick round of questions; the longer interview will have to wait for another day.
You are the angry young man of Bollywood. It has become your singular, defining quality. Where does it spring from?
I don’t know. I can’t sit quiet when someone is deliberately doing something wrong. I cannot live in fear. I can’t take abuse of authority and deliberate undermining of others. I have calmed down much more than how I used to be. I had been far more edgy and anxious. Of late, things have been falling into place. Our cinema has been getting better; our films have been regularly going to international fests. In fact, I thought the anger in me had died down. Now this episode has put me in reverse gear.
You have made a lot of enemies on the way, from Ram Gopal Varma and Khalid Mohamed to the CBFC now.
Ramu has never been an enemy. With him, it’s been like he and I were in a relationship, and it went wrong. We share a much deeper bond. You can’t retract from any fight you pick up. If I have gone wrong or overstepped, I have publically acknowledged [it].
Till now, I have been fighting enemies with the law on my side. Suddenly, in the Udta Punjab case, I found myself fighting the law itself. The Cinematograph Act [1952] has to be taken to its end. It can’t go on like this.
Your legendary fanboys seem happy.
Fanboys are as much a problem. They get ecstatic when I put up a fight. After this episode, they’d be feeling vindicated that this Kashyap guy hasn’t gone anywhere, he is still there.
Your films are peopled with dark characters.
I find the dark side fascinating: the anger or something held back inside. In Ugly, you have people who have been holding on to grudges and resentment. Raman Raghav 2.0 shows an extremely dark side without repelling the audience. I have kept the feeling of repulsion consciously out. It’s about probing the psychology of two characters: the cop and the killer. They are like two sides of a coin that has darkened over the years, so you don’t get to know which side is head or tail.
The city seems to be site for all the anxieties and fears in Raman Raghav 2.0.
The city has a large role to play in the film. The three characters are migrants. There is the girl from Andhra; I have retained the Telugu inflexions in her lingo. She was once beautiful, but the glory has faded away. The cop is from Punjab. There’s a patriarchal world he belongs to, however modern he may try to be. He carries misogyny deep within himself, the way he looks at people.
The slums in this city are made up of people from outside Mumbai, and I have shot quite extensively there.
You yourself are an outsider, a migrant.
If you look at Satya , the two writers, Saurabh Shukla and I, director Ramu, and lead actor Manoj, were all outsiders. It was the outsiders’ interpretation of the city with Ramu as our opera conductor. It’s when people reacted to it that we realised what we had managed to achieve together. It was the film on Mumbai that only outsiders could have made.
But now you belong.
I still feel like an outsider. It’s as though I have still not blended in. I hide out, stay in a corner. I still don’t know what the world looks like at the centre. I am still on the margins.
But you have friends like Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar. That’s as central as it can get.
I consider Karan to be a good friend. Zoya gives me perspective that I otherwise don’t have. But I am not central to their world. I have very few 2 a.m.-3 a.m. friends. Vasan Bala is one. Vikramaditya Motwane, but he sleeps by midnight.
The film of yours I love, Pramod Bhai 23 in 2010’s Mumbai Cutting anthology, was a rare spot of sunshine in your filmography.
What you saw was the brighter part. The whole story was much darker with all the details about the remand home life that I had shot.
Will we ever see you in a brighter zone?
I am trying hard to get out of the dark zone. I need a break from me. I want to do light films. I am looking for drafts from other writers. It has to come from a happier mindspace.
You are so good with romance when you choose to do it, like the Nawaz-Huma track in Gangs Of Wasseypur .
I want to make a real love story. I want to get there. I have stopped feeling love. I will have to begin the film with someone else writing it. Let’s see where it goes from there.
What’s coming next?
In September, I begin shooting a horror film written by Avinash Sampath and Aparna Nadig. It’s a psycho-horror, Giddy, and I am looking out for locations with extreme weather conditions. Another is a film set in north India. It’s not a sports film, but is set around sports.
