In an exclusive interview with IMDb, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has revealed that his upcoming crime drama Nishaanchi was made to “undo” his earlier film Gangs of Wasseypur.

Kashyap said, “The two films are as different from each other as distant Wasseypur is from Kanpur, like 800 km,”.

“After Wasseypur, everyone thinks that I invented swear words… I had to undo that also,” he added. “I am exhausted of people asking me for Gangs of Wasseypur 3, which is the easter egg that my producer put in the teaser… this isn’t the gang from Wasseypur.”

Kashyap explained that Nishaanchi took a decade to complete. “The right time to look at the project is when everything falls together. The cast, the producer, the studios, everything fell together now, that’s why it is the right time,” he said.

He added that casting delays were a major reason: “There’s not a single studio or actor that I have not been to. All of them wanted to do the film but they had this issue or that issue, and I did not want to change one thing in my script, they just somehow didn’t work out.”

Kashyap credited a chance encounter with an Amazon executive during a long flight to Melbourne for finally securing backing for the project. “By the time the flight landed, they had greenlit the project,” he said.

“Nishaanchi for me is a throwback to all the Hindi cinema that I have loved growing up. Like until the 80s, 70s, 60s, from all the Dilip Kumar films to the Amitabh Bachchan films, to Mother India, Mughal-E-Azam, Naya Daur, Bimal Roy’s movies, and that was everything,” the filmmaker further said.

Nishaanchi, which releases this Friday, also marks the acting debut of Aaishvary Thackeray. Kashyap praised his performance, calling him “a phenomenal talent”. “He’s an actor, music composer, lyricist, singer, he is so many things… if I don’t tell you he is Aaishvary Thackeray, you will think he’s a boy from Kanpur,” the director added.