Anurag Kashyap, if nothing else, is a man of his word. The filmmaker expressed his resolve a couple of months ago of relocating to Southern India. Turns out, he wasn’t talking off the cuff, and that transition is now complete. “I’ve left Mumbai,” he says, grinning, adding that he recently paid the first rent of his new house. He wouldn’t disclose which state or city he’s moved to (a source tells us it’s likely Bangalore). Kashyap’s reasons stand as before: disillusionment with a myopic Hindi film industry, risk-aversion among producers and platforms, insecure actors favouring lavish lifestyles over challenging and exciting work.
“I want to stay away from film people. The industry has become too toxic. Everyone is chasing unrealistic targets, trying to make the next ₹500 and ₹800 crore film. The creative atmosphere is gone.”
Kashyap’s southward drift coincides, with a sad irony, with the Hindi release of Footage, a 2024 Malayalam film starring Manju Warrier that he’s presenting. The film, an experimental found-footage thriller set during the pandemic, marks the directorial debut of editor Saiju Sreedharan (Kumbalangi Nights, Maheshinte Prathikaaram). The dubbed Hindi version will be released on March 7, 2025, over six months after the original run.
“The Hema Committee report had come out around the time of Footage’s release. The 2024 Wayanad landslides had also happened. With everything going on in the Malayalam film industry, we decided to hold off for the right time,” explains Kashyap.
He also wanted the film to be dubbed properly. The director whose Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) was dubbed in Italian, French and Spanish concedes that Hindi dubs of Southern films are frequently atrocious. “The reason I can’t watch Maharaja (starring Kashyap and Vijay Sethupathi, streaming on Netflix) is because it is so badly dubbed.” Last year, he was dubbing for Mohanlal’s voice in the Hindi version of Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Malaikottai Vaaliban; he ended up rewriting the whole script. The version is streaming on JioHotstar.
Besides Footage, Kashyap is also presenting the Kannada film Vaghachipani (Tiger’s Pond), which screened at the Berlin Film Festival, and the Tamil coming-of-age drama Bad Girl. He has acting jobs in Delulu (Malayalam) and Dacoit (Telugu-Hindi). Meanwhile, four of his directorials—including cop noir Kennedy—are awaiting release this year. Featuring Rahul Bhatt, who starred in Kashyap’s Ugly (2013), in the lead role, Kennedy was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. The film’s release was held up amid financial troubles at ZEE Studios.
“Kennedy is locked and has been cleared by the censors. But ZEE has lost a lot of money on the recent films they released. And all the people who produced the film have left the company.”
Kashyap’s affinity and evangelism for Malayalam cinema is well known. Last year, he made his Malayalam acting debut in Rifle Club, directed by Aashiq Abu. Kashyap says he had written a film for Malayalam star Mohanlal, and wanted Rajeev Ravi, his longtime cinematographer, to direct it. But the project didn’t take off, and Kashyap ended up refurbishing the story for Kennedy. The film’s title, meanwhile, is inspired by the real name of Tamil actor Vikram—a thrillingly strange genealogy for a film yet to release.
The poster for ‘Kennedy’
“The central character of Kennedy, an undercover cop named Uday Shetty, has stayed with me for a long time. It was narrated to me by Sudhir Mishra. There was actually one such man in the Mumbai force. In fact, I have a sequel web series in mind where the character survives the events of Kennedy.”
There is a also Bobby Deol-Joju George film that he’s finished, plus a two-part saga shot in Lucknow that will mark the debut of Aaishvary Thackeray, grandson of late Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray. “It’s a long, complex story featuring newcomers. But it’s nothing like Gangs of Wasseypur.”
Kashyap’s grumble with the current state of Hindi cinema is multipronged. Global streaming platforms have such a corner on the market that it has created a power imbalance. A recent Ormax Media report highlighted how streaming giants Netflix and Amazon have secured a 76% duopoly on licensing rights for theatrical films, edging out the competition. “All films until and unless acquired by OTT cannot go ahead,” Kashyap says. “So they get to dictate the content. It is why everything looks the same.”
There is also the omertà of self-censorship. Kashyap’s web series, Maximum City, an adaptation of Suketu Mehta’s eponymous novel, was cancelled by Netflix. Although his contemporaries—filmmakers like Vikramaditya Motwane, Anubhav Sinha and Sudip Sharma—have made successful web shows post the pandemic (while dialling down the overt sociopolitical commentary), Kashyap is yet to return to the space after Sacred Games.
“I am navigating my way around it,” says Kashyap, who had tried pitching another show besides Maximum City. While the involved platform “really wanted it”, the feedback he got was “too insecure and algorithm-based”. “It was destroying the soul of the show. I was pitching something else and they wanted to turn it into Money Heist. I folded my hands and left.”
Streaming content today is being shaped by data sheets culled from second-by-second user behaviour. “Everything is data-based,” asserts Kashyap. “They have data on which scene people paused at, which scene they rewatched four times, which minute thing tickled their interest. You cannot tell stories like that.”
Despite such evident doominess, Kashyap says he is in a good space. Having quit active producing, he feels less ‘burdened’, working silently on his own projects, reading and concentrating on his health. “My stress is much less, and I have left drinking.” He is directing a Malayalam-Hindi film and a Tamil film soon. He will keep returning to Mumbai for work, but that’s the extent of it. “My video library will be divided up,” he confides.
I tell Kashyap it’s difficult to imagine him away from Mumbai—he’s the writer of Satya, the maker of Black Friday and Bombay Velvet and Raman Raghav 2.0. His scruffy, crime-inflected filmography has shaped the mythology of modern Mumbai—a palimpsest of the city’s past and present.
“A city is not just a structure but also its people,” Kashyap contends. “People here… they pull you down.” He says he isn’t the first to relocate, that several working directors before him have left. “The biggest exodus is to the Middle East, especially Dubai. Others have fled to Portugal, London, Germany, US. These are mainstream filmmakers I am talking about.”
Published – March 05, 2025 03:37 pm IST
