Anurag Kashyap - Career

Career

The film festival and de Sica made a deep impact on Kashyap — he wanted to do something with films — so he landed in Mumbai in June 1993 with INR 5,000– 6,000 in his pocket. The money ran out after he stayed for a couple of days in a "good hotel." He spent the next eight months on the streets, staying in lofts, "sleeping on beaches," "under a water tank and in the St Xavier's boys hostel." He managed to find work at Prithvi Theatre, but his first play remained incomplete because the director died. He then joined Makrand Deshpande's troupe — Samrangan — but left because he "could not face life. wanted to act but couldn't act with all that frustration."

Kashyap then wrote an "eight-page drama" — Main (I) — which did well at college drama festivals. People advised him to pursue a career in writing. Kashyap's play was appreciated by directors like Govind Nihalani and Saeed Mirza. Nihalani was working on a television series based on classic works, and he gave Kashyap a couple of books—a play by Henrik Ibsen, and Franz Kafka's The Trial—so that he could write scripts based on them. Kashyap read The Trial and told Nihalani that the book could only be made into an animation film, not a regular one. Nihalani asked him to reconsider. But the books had "confused so much that started thinking that didn't know anything!" Kashyap started avoiding Nihalani; he went into "hibernation for a year and a half, and kept reading."

In 1995, an acquaintance introduced Kashyap to Shivam Nair, director of the 2006 film Ahista Ahista. The day they met, Kashyap watched Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver at Nair's place—on a "bad vcr" and using a "mutilated tape"; the film fascinated him. "I want to write something," Kashyap told Nair, and spent the next few days sitting in a corner as people like Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan and Shiv Subramaniam discussed things. Sridhar introduced him to the world of books—authors like James M. Cain. The team was working on two projects, one of which was a docu-drama, Auto Narayan, based on the life of serial killer Auto Shankar; the second one was a film scripted by Kashyap. Auto Narayan got delayed because the script penned by Subramaniam was not "working." Kashyap rewrote the script, and got credit for the same, and the second film was scrapped. But Kashyap had now proved himself, and so got access to a VCR and television set. He started bringing in video tapes and spent many days watching films. Kashyap got his first major break when actor Manoj Bajpai, who was working on Daud showed Auto Narayan to producer-director Ramgopal Varma. Varma liked Kashyap's work and hired him to write the script for Satya.

In September 1993, while Kashyap stayed at the St. Xavier's Boys Hostel, he used to hang out with the members of a band—Greek (later Pralay). He took copious notes on how they lead their lives—forty pages of a small notebook, and began writing the script—"in bits and pieces"—for a film that he called Mirage but which would later become Paanch. Kashyap had seen ex-VJ Luke Kenny in a Vikram Kapadia play, and approached him with an incomplete script, but nothing came out of it. Later on, while working with Nair, he came across files related to the Joshi-Abhyankar Serial Murders that took place in Pune in 1976.

"Five very ordinary college kids viciously murdered nine people. I got what I needed to finish my script then."

He had also seen a film, Fun, about two mentally unstable girls murdering an elderly woman. And Paanch was ready to be made into a film. Kashyap says—

"There was a structuring in Fun, which you will also see in Paanch. There was something in Fun. When I began looking for it, I saw a pattern in Last Train to Mahakali, in my own film Paanch and in Auto Narayan. All three films had a similar formula. I am able to analyze it because I have.

Satya was a commercial and critical success, and Kashyap collaborated with Varma on a few more films writing the screenplay and dialogues for Kaun? (1999) and the dialogues for Shool (1999). He also wrote the dialogues for Mani Ratnam's Yuva (2004). Kashyap made his directorial debut with Paanch, with Kay Kay Menon as the lead in 2000. However, the film ran into trouble with the Indian censor board and hasn't been released to date. In 2007, he adapted Stephen King's 1978 short story "Quitters, Inc." as No Smoking, which despite being received well by critics, didn't do well at the box-office. This was followed by Return of Hanuman (previously Hanuman Returns) a Hindi animation film about adventures of the Hindu god Hanuman.

Then, in 2009, came Dev.D. Written and directed by him, the film is a modern day take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's classic Bengali novel Devdas, previously adapted for the screen by such revered filmmakers as P.C. Barua and Bimal Roy, and more recently by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Dev.D was embraced by the media, critics and public alike, and is considered to be amongst path-breaking films in Hindi for the way it presented itself.

In March 2009, while announcing steering away from screenwriting, after his current assignments to concentrate on direction, Kashyap also announced two new film projects. Bombay Velvet, a thriller based on real incidents in 1960s, based on a script by Princeton University Historian Gyan Prakash, will be produced by Danny Boyle starring Ranbir Kapoor. Doga, the second film, will be based on the Raj Comics super hero.

In 2010 he played a child abuser in Onir's I Am, revealing that the role was meaningful to him because he had been sexually abused as a child.

He has also written the script of Kabhie Kabhie (1997 TV series) with Akash Khurana and Vinta Nanda which was telecast on Star Plus and this program was directed by Mahesh Bhatt having star casts like Shefali Shah as Radha Pathak, Lillete Dubey as Shama Joshi, Deepak Parashar as Nirmal Joshi, Rohit Roy as Vijay Sinha, Surekha Sikri as Lakshmi Pathak, Alok Nath and Kunika.

In 2012 he has also produced a music album called SATAN which features famous singer Yo Yo Honey Singh with whom he has worked earlier for his production Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana.