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| Anurag’s favourite documentaries The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer) Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite) Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner) Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley) 20 Feet From Stardom (Morgan Neville) The Imposter (Bart Layton) |
Sitting inside Anurag Kashyap’s screening room in his Versova apartment, surrounded by more DVDs than the biggest video libraries anywhere in the world can house, you feel you are in a movie temple. And it’s also the best place to talk cinema with the pujari himself, the self-confessed film geek, who, after 14 movies and a million controversies, wants a little peace in his personal life and just wants to direct his own films in his work life. Over to Kashyap...
What made you present the documentary The World Before Her?
I loved the film. When director Nisha Pahuja gave me the DVD, I saw it three days in a row. I was very affected by it. It had travelled to many festivals but no one was releasing it in India. She asked me if I would like to be associated with it. I said: “Happily!” I have lent my name to it. I believe in it and have been talking about it extensively.
What about the film affected you so much?
It’s about two young women participating in two very different types of training camps. There’s this girl who is training to become Miss India, and there’s this other girl who is a militant Hindu nationalist with the Durga Vahini. Both are trying to escape the world they live in but they are two parallel new worlds. It’s a false sense of empowerment the two girls get from these new worlds and it’s something we have created. You start fitting into the expectations of someone else, rather than finding yourself. And it comes across so well because it is such a nonjudgemental film.
With Gulabi Gang and now The World Before Her, there is a sudden excitement in the mainstream exhibition space about documentary films. Is that too a false sense of empowerment for these films?
Totally. These films are releasing but the exhibitors are not giving them that kind of space and as a result people are not going and watching them. The good thing is that suddenly now documentaries exist... on Torrents, on the Internet, on home videos. This first lot of documentaries would probably die on the altar and pave way for the documentaries to follow. It will take time.
Why do Indian audiences stay away from documentaries while almost every other country has non-fiction films in their regular programming?
It is the way we look at everything that needs to change. You talk to a man on the street and he knows the box-office figures of films. Cinema for them is escapist. Everyone says that one line they have borrowed from somewhere: “We go through misery all our lives; why would we want to see the same on screen?” Everyone’s adopted that line as their own. Nobody wants to be confronted with their ugly sides. Nothing should make them uncomfortable and anything that makes them uncomfortable, they label it as bad.
Have you ever wanted to make documentaries yourself?
I started watching documentaries four-five years ago and I have watched quite a lot in these few years. Only for one subject I felt like making a documentary but I was too lazy to pursue it. Nobody’s touched that subject yet. So maybe in the future.
How different is a documentary maker from a fiction filmmaker?
When you are making a documentary you have to be a lot more open. You cannot let your own biases and prejudices and points of view colour what you are shooting. As fiction filmmakers, we play god; we control the lives of the characters. For documentaries, you just let it be. You are the medium. You are the seeker.
Which of your films do you consider the closest that you’ve come to documenting a piece of history or culture of India?
Black Friday was almost like a documentary. It was a docudrama. It was my purest film. I was very naive when I made that. And then the industry makes you lose your innocence. Innocence is the key to strength for a filmmaker. And every time you try and imbibe that lost innocence. But the world makes you so aware about things that you can’t unlearn everything suddenly. Like in Wasseypur, you knew that you can’t use original names and when you change names you immediately start thinking that it has to work as a film and so you combine three real-life characters to make one villain. The manipulation starts there and then it doesn’t stop.
Ugly has been lying ready since the middle of last year. It’s releasing this week in French theatres. You have not been releasing it here to fight the health ministry over the smoking disclaimer. The High Court has turned down your petition. Has this fight been worth it?
It’s not a happy scenario for sure. In Ugly there is this big revelation scene where the man is holding a cigarette in his hands and he discovers something. The cigarette is not even lit and they want to put an anti-smoking logo there. It completely kills the whole film. They don’t really care about it.
We are living in very strange times where everyone has an opinion on cinema but not on other things in the country. This anti-smoking disclaimer I find dumb and insulting. Cigarette is legal, smoking is legal, cigarettes are openly sold in the markets, on the streets... it’s only filmmakers who are told what to do because you don’t have the balls to take on the tobacco lobby. And you can show murder, but not smoking. It doesn’t make sense to me!
Other people here just don’t care; for them cinema means first three days of business. Nobody fights for anything. Barring a Prakash Jha or a Mahesh Bhatt.
Do you now write or make films keeping the foreign festivals in mind, given the kind of clout you have there?
Never. Neither Gangs of Wasseypur or Ugly was made with festivals in mind. Wasseypur we didn’t even apply. Someone saw and recommended the film. We were shocked. The whole idea behind Wasseypur was that I wanted a film to make money at the Indian box office. Actually when Paanch and Black Friday weren’t releasing, I was desperately trying for other international avenues. And only when I stopped looking for them, they came looking for my films. It’s true that an entirely new channel has opened up and half my risk is taken care of abroad. That makes me more brave and makes me go out and do what I want to do.
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| L-R: Vikramaditya Motwane, Vikas Bahl, Vijay Singh (Fox Star Studio CEO), Karan Johar, Ranbir Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap at the wrap-up party of Bombay Velvet in Mumbai |
You have also suddenly completely stopped producing new projects by new directors...
My company was initially floated to empower new filmmakers and even to empower me. After the success of Udaan, many new filmmakers came to me. They had scripts, they had studios, they wanted me to associate with them. I liked them, liked what they wanted to make, I said ‘yes’. But soon I realised that I can’t handle it. I am not cut out for it; I am a filmmaker.
I spent one whole year just doing promotions for various movies and not doing anything else. Also, my personal life was suffering very badly because of it. I was travelling with those films, representing them and marketing them... I had no life... and I wasn’t making any movies. That’s when I realised that this is not what I wanted to do; I got sucked into it. Before withdrawing I had to create an alternative because whatever we had created would have gone. So Guneet (Monga) stepped in. She had been my line producer, I had made her my partner and she was then pushed out to explore the distribution and marketing channels abroad.
I am no longer involved with the non-creative aspects of filmmaking. I have suffered for it enough. I have lost a lot in my life for that; I don’t want to go there again. Besides my own films, I write for Vikram (Vikramaditya Motwane, Udaan), maybe edit for Vikas (Bahl, Queen). That’s about it. I just want to enjoy being a filmmaker.
Doesn’t it pain you that your assistants and erstwhile assistants are running around with scripts looking for funding...
I feel for them and I wish I can do things for them. But that’s just my emotional feeling for them. They all need to figure things out for themselves. They are all good filmmakers and they really need to be very independent. They also somewhere have realised that. They have also made choices for their movies which are not obvious choices for studios. So, they have to deal with the consequences. I take care of them in other ways, so that they don’t have to go through the kind of suffering I had to go through.
Your Bombay Velvet with Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma is a huge film made at Rs 110 crore. You have never been in a situation where your film is one of the big-ticket releases of the year. Prepared for this new challenge?
I am not interested in how many crores the film makes but since this film costs so much, I would definitely not want anyone to lose money. I will look at the collections only till the point the film breaks even. At the end of the day it’s my kind of movie. Yet there is no reference point for this film in the Indian context. It’s like one of those big period films you see the world over. We have tried to recreate a world in as authentic a way as possible. More than 75 per cent of the budget of the film has gone into production and not to any individual. It’s a first in almost all respects.
The word is you are in love again...
Well, that’s the Mumbai tabloids for you. I am dating someone but I don’t want to bring the media into it this time. As it is, it has done a lot of damage to me. I don’t understand the media’s obsession with my personal life. I just want some peace.
Are you in touch with Kalki?
Yes we are still close friends but we have completely separated as a couple.
You have been putting up photos with your friend Martin Scorsese on your Facebook account...
He is just too cool. He is so real. The reason you get along with someone like him is because you can just be yourself with him. You don’t try and impress him, he doesn’t try and impress you. They are all geeks, all childlike when it comes to cinema. It’s actually comforting when you meet someone like Scorsese. Because you realise there’s nothing wrong with you. Here every person you meet makes you feel that there’s something wrong with you. But when I meet him, I know I am doing just fine, whatever I am doing.
