FINAL PART
Q:The next film that came out was Return of Hanuman – an animation film and a complete change in direction and genre. Why?
I had wrote it for my daughter .My closest friend for the last 20 years, is Imtiaz Ali. We came to Bombay together. And he is this mainstream popular film maker and makes these incredible love stories that my daughter is allowed to watch .And most of my films are certified adult. So she kept complaining why can’t you make a film that i can take my friends to . Which is why i wrote the film.I was not supposed to direct it. The guy who made the first film somehow couldn’t deal with the story that i wrote .He said this film meant for children. What is this stuff about Chitragupt having sex with Menaka? And in India we don’t call them animation films,we call it cartoon films and basically everything is done in 3 months. They don’t give you time or the money. We just have to finish the film .I was called mid-way through the film, which is 1 ½ months into production. I was told, you just have to stand there and give directions to the tech guys. I asked, but what is a director supposed to do here?
I would just want to change everything and obviously that was never possible, because it takes double the time. I was literally learning on the job and i would never go there again. The only thing i got out of it was that i got to dedicate it to my daughter and premiered it on her birthday to her entire school and that was the biggest day of her life. That meant the world to me.
Q:So after a lot of fluctuations, finally a success in the form of Dev.D which was box-office success .How did you work out the whole look of the film?
The idea ..well this is the look i has worked out for Alwin Kalicharan . Dev.D was shot in all the locations where Alwin Kalicharan was supposed to be shot. During my college years, we used to spend a lot of time in Paharganj.
Q:It was Abhay Deol’s idea, of this modern interpretation of Devdas . He has also been credited with the concept of the film.
Yeah, Abhay had this idea of movie set in Las Vegas in a strip club called Chandramukhi. But what it did was, it planted a seed in my head. And i am not a big fan of Devdas as a character. If you read Sarat Chandra’s life, Devdas has lot of parallels to his own life. He had run away from Bengal and went to Burma and experimented with drugs and all. So only his personal life interested me more .So i used a lot of those elements from Sarat Chandra’s life that were camouflaged in Devdas. I have read the story of Devdas, i have read a lot of Sarat Chandra’s work. But i didn’t re-read it before writing Dev.D because i had already decided what i wanted to do with it .So i told Vikramaditya Motwane, a big fan of Devdas, my co-writer and who directed Udaan that you write your version of Devdas and i will take your version of the script and i will make my own version out if it. Vikram did his work in 3 months. It was Vikram who changed the script and took the scene to Punjab .Then i took that and reworked it.
Q:The first part of the film; was it a conscious subversion to the Yash Chopra kind of films?
No.. but the moment Vikram wrote Punjab, i said i want to shoot the real Punjab .The way Punjab is, not the kind of Punjab we see in films. We went and found the sugarcane fields instead of those mustard fields.
Q:How did you then get to the idea of Gulaal which has student politics and a smattering of national politics?
Gulaal came out a lot confusion ,written post Paanch when the CD of Pyaasa was on a constant loop on my CD–man. Then this person Raj Singh Chaudhary came to me with a story .I liked the story but it had no place mentioned in it. So i asked him where’s he from? He said Rajasthan and then we went to Rajasthan on a road trip and i was talking to a lot of Royals. This was in 2000.That was also the time when they were running out of money and mulling to sell their castles to the hotel chains. That had become the case by the time, the film came out.
Q:It made to the London Film Festival .What was the reception to Gulaal?
Gulaal , i think has over a period of time become my most liked film across the Hindi speaking heartland. It is the highest viewed film on Zee TV in the last 1 ½ years. It shows every 1 month and according to Zee is their highest revenue generator. At the time of the release, nobody saw it, but over the years it has become really popular in North India. Strangely, i can get anything done in the government offices there, because they love Gulaal. From police officers to ministers, their favourite film is Gulaal and half my jobs are done because of that !
Q:You have also started producing films. Aamir for Raj Kumar Gupta , Udaan for Vikramaditya Motwane and Shaitan for Bijoy Nambiar. How can anyone get a film made through you?
I don’t have the capacity to produce films .We don’t have the money most of the time. But we have an office space, where a whole lot of kids from film schools turn up, people who want to make films, and people who think they can make films. My office is full of these young kids, who refuse to go .I don’t have salary to give them and i keep telling them that i can’t hire you .But because of these kids, i realised something. It's that while most of my films were not making money at the box-office, but when you get on to imdb.com, No Smoking has more votes than the film that was a big success that year .So there are definitely people watching those films. But they are watching it on the internet, after downloading. The audience is a non–paying one. These are students who don’t have the money to go watch all films. They wait for the torrents to turn up. I started cultivating that audience.
Now companies coming up with new technologies notice that on the internet i have a bigger audience. They started contacting me for this short film contests now and then. Aircel gave me $ 250,000 to make 12 short films. I started taking these on and passing then on to these guys in the office. And through those short films i can know whether they are ready to make films.
Q:How much are you in control of those films that you produce?
I see the first cut when they are ready to show me their first cut.
Q:And finally your latest film That Girl in Yellow Boots which screened in London the day before.
It’s my most uncompromising film yet and i had complete freedom to make it . We did a lot of improvisation in this films and Kalki has a huge role to play in it as a writer and actor. And because it was screened in London that we got a distributor.
Anurag Kashyap has finished the post-production of his next film Gangs of Wasseypur , starring Manoj Bajpai , Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Richa Chadda and is scheduled for an early 2012 release in India.
This is an abridged version of the interview, which Anurag Kashyap gave as a part of the London Indian Film Festival workshop.
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