Anurag Kashyap is celebrating his 52nd birthday on September 10. The director is one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, having paved the way for Independent Cinema in India. His films are bold, agile, angry and never not experimental. From Black Friday to Gangs of Wasseypur to Manmarziyan, he is unafraid to take risks, with varying results. He is equally frank and candid in his interviews, expressing his opinions on a wide range of topics. Take a look at some of his fascinating remarks on filmmaking, directing in Bollywood and more. 

‘I am anti-film school’

Anurag Kashyap advised young filmmakers not to attend film schools. In 2023, during an interview with Unfiltered with Samdhish, the filmmaker said, “Don't go to a film school. I am anti-film school. Go to a design school. If you want to be a filmmaker go to NID Ahmedabad. Go to any design school across the world. Go to Tisch. Anyone who goes to a film school is doomed for failure. How many students from FTII have graduated to become directors? The editing and cinematography students do it. How many direction students do we have? Very few. There is so much peer pressure at that time. Cinema came first, then came its theory. The theory was made by those who had not made cinema. I don't listen to those who have not made cinema. They cannot teach me anything.”

On making Gangs of Wasseypur and premiering at Cannes

At the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his now-cult film Gangs of Wasseypur in 2012, Anurag spoke to The Hollywood Reporter and said how his films are not dependent on validation of any external kind. He said, “You are not expected to rock the boat, you don’t change the status quo, especially in films, which have been traditionally controlled by a handful of people, actually film families. Outsiders are not supposed to change anything. I can’t complain about that, but now there is change happening. The young filmmakers really don’t give a damn about the establishment. They want to do their own thing, they are not star-struck, especially if you see the other Indian films at Cannes [director Ashim Ahluwalia’s Un Certain Regard entry Miss Lovely and Vasan Bala’s Peddlers]. I still have one foot in Bollywood (the mainstream Hindi industry), but these guys are totally independent of that. They worked hard for years to get their films made independently. My film is still funded by a studio [Viacom18 Motion Pictures]. My responsibility is now only to my kind of cinema, but these new directors will do more to change Indian cinema since their films are very fearless.”

On learning from the failure of Bombay Velvet

Anurag's big-budget gangster film Bombay Velvet, starring Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma, failed at the box office. In an interview with Indian Express in 2015, Anurag said how he could not decipher what went wrong with the film. “I have mostly made films that have been rejected by the audiences. None of my films have found acceptance immediately. This time (with `Bombay Velvet’) it affected me more than the ban(s) on ‘Paanch’ and ‘Black Friday’ affected me. It was all very confusing. It was like something I still can’t decipher. It was not just dismissed as a film that did not work. It was attacked. A lot of people who had lived through that time or knew the Bombay of that time went on Twitter liking the film and they were attacked. I’m saying you don’t like the film, you don’t like the film. But you don’t troll people who liked it. The first thing I learnt from `BV’ was– make your film and move on. In spite of that, I still edit the film in my head. I lived with it for 10 years. I wanted to re-create that world. It was something every studio wanted, everyone wanted. ​Till a day before (the release), everyone was confident. It (the failure) numbed everyone. No one (connected with the film) has talked to anyone since.”

‘We’re very easily offended’

In 2022, Anurag talked about how filmmakers in the industry are restricted in different ways. “At the moment, we can’t do anything that is remotely political, or remotely religious. Those are big nos. And big nos not because anyone has said that you can’t do that, but because everybody is living in an atmosphere where they don’t know how anybody is going to react. Right now, we’re very fragile, we’re very easily offended. So, for creators in India, it’s a great time to create long-form storytelling and new experimental stuff, but at the same time, we are walking a very thin line,” he said during the BFI screening of his film Dobaaraa.

'The negativity did get to me'

In 2023, Anurag revealed that he was 'really affected' by the negativity in the industry and had almost thought of quitting filmmaking. In an interview with News18, Anurag said, “The negativity did get to me for sometime for one or two years. But I think, I was done with it by 2021. But I was really affected by it for two years. Everything was affected and I was actually thinking about somewhere else. My friends from South invited me to make films in Tamil. My friend from Kerala invited me to make films in Malayalam. I also got invitation to make German and French films. But since I don’t know the languages, how would I be able to make them in the first place? All these things happened and I thought I should move out. But then I am glad I decided to stay. And now it’s over. Now it doesn’t affect me. I don’t even have the need to justify anything. I just want to keep making films. And I’ve been writing and writing and writing."

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