Anurag Kashyap (born 10 September 1972) is an Indian filmmaker and actor known for his works in Hindi cinema. He is the recipient of four Filmfare Awards. The Government of France made him a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2013.
Kashyap got his major break as a co-writer in Ram Gopal Varma's crime drama Satya (1998) and made his directorial debut with Paanch, which never had a theatrical release due to censorship issues. He then went on to direct Black Friday (2004), a film based on the namesake book by Hussain Zaidi about the 1993 Bombay bombings. Its release was held up for two years by the District Board of Film Certification because of the pending verdict of the case at that time but was released in 2007 to critical appreciation. Kashyap's follow-up, No Smoking (2007) met with mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box-office. His next venture Dev.D (2009), a modern adaptation of Devdas, received positive reviews and was a commercial success; followed by the socio-political drama Gulaal (2009).
Kashyap's prominence increased with the two-part crime drama, Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), which received worldwide critical acclaim and moderate box office success and considered a cult film now. Kashyap subsequently co-produced the critically acclaimed drama The Lunchbox (2013), and the biographical drama Shahid (2012), the former earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language nomination. His next acclaimed films were the anthology Bombay Talkies (2013), the drama Ugly (2014), Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), inspired by the serial killer Raman Raghav and Mukkabaaz (2018). He also co-directed India's first Netflix Original series, the crime thriller Sacred Games, based on Vikram Chandra's novel of the same name and the romantic drama Manmarziyaan.
Early life Kashyap was born on 10 September 1972 to a Gaharwar Rajput family in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. His father Prakash Singh is a retired Chief Engineer of the Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited and was posted in Obra Thermal Power Station in Sonbhadra district near Varanasi.
He did his primary schooling from Hillgrange Preparatory School in Dehradun, and grade seven onwards, from the Scindia School in Gwalior.
Some of the locations used in Gangs of Wasseypur are also influenced from his own old house where he himself lived with his parents, sister, Anubhuti Kashyap, and brother, Abhinav Kashyap. Abhinav is also a filmmaker, who made his directorial debut with the masala blockbuster, Dabangg (2010). Anubhuti has been his assistant in most of his films. She made her directorial debut with Doctor G (2022), a medical campus comedy, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Rakul Preet Singh, Shefali Shah and Sheeba Chaddha.
Owing to his desire to become a scientist, Kashyap went to Delhi for his higher studies and enrolled himself into a zoology course at the Hansraj College (University of Delhi); he graduated in 1993. He then eventually joined the street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch; and did many street plays.The 'Pahli Seedi' Anurag Kashyap Interview , excerpts from the interview (in Hindi) conducted by Pravesh Bhardwaj and Ajay Brahmatmaj The same year, couple of his friends "urged [him] to catch a de Sica retrospective" at the International Film Festival of India. In ten days, he saw 55 films at the festival, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves was the film that influenced him the most.
Career
After the de Sica experience, Kashyap arrived in Mumbai in 1993 with INR 5,000 in his pocket. Soon the money ran out, and he spent months on the streets, staying in lofts, "sleeping on beaches", "under a water tank and in the St Xavier's [college] boys hostel." He then managed to find work at Prithvi Theatre, but his first play remained incomplete because the director died.
Writer and director
1990–1999 In 1995, an acquaintance introduced Kashyap to Shivam Nair. The day they met, Kashyap watched Taxi Driver (1976) at Nair's place, and the film inspired him to "write something". The team of Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan and Shiv Subramaniam were working on two projects, one of which was a short TV series, 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 written by Subramaniam was not "working". Kashyap rewrote the script and got credit for the same, but it was scrapped. In 1997, he wrote the screenplay of Hansal Mehta's first film, Jayate which failed to find a theatrical release; and episodes of the TV series Kabhie Kabhie (1997).
In 1998, actor Manoj Bajpayee suggested his name to Ram Gopal Varma to write a film. Varma liked Kashyap's Auto Narayan and hired him, alongside Saurabh Shukla to write the script for his crime film, Satya (1998). Satya was a critical and commercial success, and is regarded as one of the best films of Indian cinema. He later collaborated with Varma in scripting Kaun (1999) and writing dialogues for Shool (1999). In 1999, he made a short film, titled Last Train to Mahakali for television. He wrote dialogues for Nayak: The Real Hero.
2000–2009 While working with Nair, Kashyap came across files related to the Joshi-Abhyankar serial murders that took place in Pune in 1976, which became the inspiration for his directorial debut Paanch. A crime thriller about a group of five friends of a rock band who turn into criminals. The film faced trouble with the Central Board of Film Certification because the board felt that it dealt unapologetically with sex, drugs and celebrated violence. It was cleared by the Board in 2001, but remains unreleased due to some problems faced by the producer. In these years, he also wrote dialogues for many films including Paisa Vasool (2004), Mani Ratnam's Yuva (2004), the Canadian film Water (2005), Main Aisa Hi Hoon (2005) and Mixed Doubles (2006).
After a failed attempt to make Allwyn Kalicharan in 2003, Kashyap started working on Black Friday, a film based on the namesake book by Hussain Zaidi about the 1993 Bombay bombings. The Bombay high court put a stay on the release of the film, until the judgement in the bomb blasts case was delivered. It was decided after a petition filed by a group of 1993 bomb blasts accused, challenging the release of the film based on their case. The film got censorship clearance in 2007, and was released after two years meeting universal acclaim. Nikhat Kazmi gave the film a three star out of five rating and mentioned: "It was indeed a difficult film to make, yet the director has managed to grapple with all the loose threads and put them together in a composite whole. So much so, the film moves like a taut thriller, without ideology coloring the sepia frames."
The same year, Kashyap adapted Stephen King's short story "Quitters, Inc." into No Smoking. A surrealistic thriller about a chain-smoker who gets trapped in the maze of a person who guarantees will make him quit smoking. The film starring John Abraham, Ayesha Takia, Ranvir Shorey and Paresh Rawal in the leads with music by Vishal Bhardwaj, premiered at the Rome Film Festival. No Smoking received an overwhelming negative reception and failed at the box-office. CNN-IBN's Rajeev Masand called it a "colossal disappointment". His final release of the year was Return of Hanuman, an animation film about adventures of the Hindu god Hanuman.
In 2009, Kashyap had two releases. Dev.D, a contemporary takes on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel Devdas. It was the twelfth film adaptation of the Bengali novel. Starring Abhay Deol who actually pitched the original idea of the film to Kashyap, with Mahie Gill and newcomer Kalki Koechlin portraying the characters of "Paro" and Chandramukhi respectively. The film met with generally positive reviews and strong box office results. Gulaal, a political drama, was his final release of that year. Kashyap started working on the film in 2005 and had finished 70–80 per cent of the film in 2006, when its producer fell ill. Later on, Zee Motion Pictures took over the project and was finally finished in 2008 and released on 13 March 2009. Anupama Chopra gave the film three stars and referred to Kashyap as "the Anti-Yash Chopra". Despite positive reviews, the film underperformed at the box office.
2010s Mumbai Cutting (2010), an anthology film, was his next directorial venture. It consisted of eleven short films made by eleven directors. He directed one of the short films. It premiered at the 2008 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
In 2011, Kashyap directed That Girl in Yellow Boots, a thriller starring Kalki Koechlin who also co-wrote the film with him. The film was screened at many festivals including 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, 67th Venice International Film Festival, Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and the London Indian Film Festival. Shot in thirteen days, the film was released in September 2011. Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 out of 4 stars, praising the character-driven film and the portrayal of its lead alongside the city compared to most Hindi films: " a film like this provides a radically different view of India than you can find in the pleasures and excesses of Bollywood".
In 2012, Kashyap came up with his ambitious directorial venture Gangs of Wasseypur, which screened at the 2012 Cannes Directors' Fortnight, London Indian Film Festival, Toronto film festival and the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. The film with an ensemble cast, was a two-part crime saga centered on the coal mafia of Dhanbad with the story spanning from the early 1940s to 2009. The first part was released on 22 June, and the second on 8 August 2012, both receiving appreciation from Indian and international critics alike. The combined budget of the two films allowed it to be a box-office success.
In 2013, Kashyap directed That Day After Everyday, a 20-minute short film that was released on YouTube; starring Radhika Apte, Geetanjali Thapa and Sandhya Mridul. It showed the story of three working women facing troubles every day, both inside and outside their houses and how they overcome them. Dealing with issues like eve teasing and public molestation, the video got four lakh hits in two days. Speaking about the purpose of the project, Kashyap showed his intention to make people feel angry without offering a solution. The same year he teamed up with Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar to direct "Murabba", one of the four segments of anthology film Bombay Talkies. It was made to celebrate the 100 years of Indian cinema, and was screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The film did not perform well at the box office, but was well received by critics.
His next film was Ugly (2014), a thriller about the kidnapping of a struggling actor's daughter, and the events followed by it. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation. The film's theatrical release was halted for over a year regarding censorship issues over depiction of smoking in it. Though it was released on 26 December 2014 to generally positive reviews.
Kashyap's next release was Bombay Velvet (2015), a period film set in Bombay in the 1960s, based on Princeton University Historian Gyan Prakash's book Mumbai Fables. It stars Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma and Karan Johar. The film was co-edited by the Academy Award winner editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who is known for her collaboration with Martin Scorsese. Released on 15 May 2015, some critics appreciated its retro-look, performances, styling and music, but criticized its faltered storytelling. It also emerged as a box-office failure. Bombay Velvet was Kashyap's dream project and its failure was a huge disappointment to him. In an interview with critic Rajeev Masand, Kashyap stated that at one point he wanted to leave India because he felt that people here did not understand his films but then realized that he did not manage the budget of the film.