Mumbai (IANS) – One might imagine Indian film director Anurag Kashyap as a guarded, serious guy who spends all day buried in a book or his favorite DVD collection and who never smiles. His films may have contributed to this impression, but the truth is far from it. The filmmaker has a knack for humor and boasts a repertoire of “dad jokes and morbid jokes.”
During the conversation, Anurag spoke about finding humour in everyday things. He said, “I have a lot of dad jokes, morbid jokes and inappropriate jokes (laughs). Humour is something you have to find which genre suits you. You might be good at clean comedy, slapstick comedy or black jokes. It is up to you to find what you are good at and keep practising your timing, delivery and timing. I find humour in everyday things and incorporate it in my films the way I like.”
Throughout his career, Anurag has always tried to make the films he wanted to make, without being constrained by the conventional norms of the Hindi film industry. He is currently one of India’s most successful independent filmmakers. But such success comes at a price; not every film resonates with the audience immediately. Sometimes, films are hailed as masterpieces or “ahead of their time” much after their theatrical release, but Anurag refuses to acknowledge such terms.
Anurag said, “For me, every film has a different reason for being made. It is easy for someone to say, ‘You made a film ahead of your time’. But I made the film when I had the idea. I am not ahead of my time. Maybe the audience is lagging behind. When you look at films from France, Germany, Siberia, Iran etc, you realise how far behind we are compared to them in terms of quality content.”
The director feels Hindi cinema is still stuck in formulaic conventions. “People outside India are making great films,” he added.
And he pointed to the Malayalam film industry as an even stronger example. Anurag said, “I think the issue of chasing trends is a big issue in Hindi films. Look at the Kerala film industry, they’re doing a really great job. The irony is, after seeing ‘Manjumel Boys’, I wrote on Letterboxd that no one in the Hindi film industry would give money to ‘Manjumel Boys’, but if it gets a good response, people will remake it.”
And guess what happened? It happened exactly as he predicted. “Two days after the film released, a producer asked me if I knew the maker of ‘Manjumel Boys’ as he wanted to remake the film in Hindi,” he said.
Anurag continued, “If S.S. Rajamouli had been a Hindi director, he would never have been able to make the kind of films that he became famous for. That being said, I would say I am the most blessed independent filmmaker in the country as I get to make the films I want to make. Other filmmakers unfortunately don’t get the opportunity to make their voice known.”
He also noted that India has a huge disproportionate number of screens compared to its population of 1.4 billion (the largest in the world), so the market is trend-driven.
He will be playing a villain in his next streaming series, Bad Cop, which is set to premiere on Disney Plus Hotstar on June 21. When asked if the crime genre is something that interests him as an actor, he said: “My life began at the most impressionable age with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’. I’ve always been in this world.”
“I read a lot of noir and crime novels. There’s something about crime novels that intrigues me in terms of what makes someone a criminal, what drives them to commit a crime,” he added.
