Interview with Anurag Kashyap

By -


A massive presence among us – Anurag Kashyap, we let him another sip on his Margarita. For the most part, we were poking, biting, probing, and seeking; for the remaining, we wanted to let the interview become a discussion between our favorite type of people – people who love cinema. Indian Auteur talks to Mr. Anurag Kashyap.

NOTE – A lot of discussion off-the-record remains unpublished, for the fear of inviting controversy, no more of which, Mr.Kashyap seems to be very welcoming towards now. I can only assure the gentle reader that he stands to miss a lot, but then, such is life.

Plus- Those who have missed, do check out the legendary debate between Anurag Kashyap his band of followers and us.

The Filmmaker, Fanboys&Cinephile Debate

How did your vast reading of the Hindi pulp novels help in developing your screenwriting style?
I would have to say that I am not consciously aware of any such influence. As an afterthought, however, I would have to say that they did help. I was a person who could not speak English till I was 17, and all my reading was based only in Hindi. Thus, yes, I can now count reading of those novels as one of my formative influences.

After you came to Delhi, you became involved with the Jan Natya Manch, an organization which performed street plays. Did that influence your filmmaking in any way, since your films seem inherently devoid of theatre as such?

Yes, there I agree with you. My films would not betray influences of theatre, except Gulaal, which carries within it, indelible, and obvious influences of the medium. For instance, I met Mr.Piyush Mishra while working for Jan Natya Manch, and it was there that I first saw his recitals, and it was there and then that I took a decision to use him in one of my films, which eventually, turned out to be Gulaal.

You wrote that 2009 would be a turning point in Cinema, so what exactly do you mean by this turning point? In what context, would we see a change hitherto unseen?

In the sense that independent films, made by people working outside the studio system, produced by independent producers, would find themselves being released at a popular scale. For instance, January 30 saw the release of Luck By Chance, the subsequent week saw the release of Dev D., and then there were films like Delhi 6, which though a failure, can be termed an ambitious failure. Recent weeks have seen a simultaneous release of films such as Barah Aana, Firaaq and as such. Read More


Indian Auteur articles on his films and more:

GULAL
DEV D
NO SMOKING
Issue No-1
Cinephile Meeting

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Satyajit Ray, 'What's wrong with Indian Films?

By -
Image
2008 The year is drawing to a close and top-ten lists have already started hitting the Internet. While going through several list of the, ‘Best movies of the year- distributed and non-distributed,’ it’s sad and remarkable to see the omission of Indian films. Over the years, there seems to be either ignorance on part of film festivals, critics, organizers about our cinema or in a country of over billion people,we are not able to make one worthwhile film that could transcend boundaries and cultural space- irrespective of being Indian. Beside let’s make this clear- Slumdog Millionaire is not an Indian film as the media seemed to project, rather it’s a British film with an Indian context. And so instead of proclaiming this as our conquest on the global stage, we should lament why anyone from our own industry couldn’t achieve this feat. While it's high time we should move on from talking about our scripts reaching the Oscar library or the growth of Bollywood in the US and UK box-offic
Read more

Satyajit Ray

By -
Image
Satyajit Ray Date of Publication: 2004-06-03 Language: English Author: Amitav Ghosh In 1989, during my first extended stay in New York, I was suddenly struck by a wave of Ray nostalgia. It was no coincidence perhaps that I had recently finished writing The Shadow Lines, which is, of all my novels, the one that more clearly shows the influence of Satyajit Ray. It struck me that Ray too had once been a stranger in this overwhelming city; that he too had walked the streets on Manhattan in Kolkata-bought shoes. One day, plucking up my courage, I made an appointment with the director James Ivory, who I knew to be a friend of Ray's. Later that week I went to interview Ivory, cassette recorder in hand. This is how Ivory described his first meeting with Ray, in the winter of 1960: 'I looked him up in Calcutta,' Ivory said. 'I had never met him. I had seen at that point, Pather Panchali ('Song of the Road') and Aparajito ('Undefeated'). I knew that Apur Sansar (&
Read more

THE DELHI MANIFESTO

By -
Image
THE DELHI MANIFESTO Our cinema screen has become an ill-constructed, and conventional portal to a world we aspire of, rather than a mirror, which reflects us. Our emotions are guided by leitmotifs placed deftly, and religious beliefs exploited. Our spirit of inquiry has become dead and we have been reduced to mere receivers in the process. Cinema and television has replaced interaction with imposition of thought. Its thought. An artificial, fake and ill-created thought, a manifestation of our needs to escape ourselves. The medium has become a symbol of cheap entertainment, devoid of any examination of the form, and a victim of our collective need to create personalities, perfect alternate universes, and images of our aspiration. Our criticism has become trivial. Stories take precedent over the intrinsic qualities of the cinematic medium. Our film lovers are snobs, indulging in their wholehearted pseudo-intellectual diatribe, condemning the ignorant, and the ignorant have become so used
Read more