Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Anurag Kashyap a Mayank Shekhar, pubblicata lo scorso 12 giugno da Mid-Day. Il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale. Anurag Kashyap talks about his fight with KJo, meeting with SRK:
'The first time ever that filmmaker Imtiaz Ali saw what a portfolio looked like (...) was that of an actor called Anurag Kashyap. Back then, Ali was in college in Delhi, helping out a local TV serial crew, when Kashyap approached him with his portfolio. "It was 1992. (...) I had just discovered theatre, and was told that you need to get pictures clicked, if you want work. I did, after collecting Rs 3000, which was a big sum then. And I started doing a lot of acting on stage, and I did some films. (...) Also, (...) Imtiaz (...) was my co-star. (...) We don't talk about it. Imtiaz will kill me. (...) The good thing about being a bad actor is you know how to extract great performances," Kashyap tells me later. Which in his case, I'm told, notoriously involves hardly ever saying "action" or "cut" on set. Often, no lines for actors to mug up, let alone extensive rehearsals, before shoot. It's a process only the best can survive. Ali, of course, played the '93 Bombay bomb blast accused Yakub Memon in Kashyap's first release, Black Friday 2007. He played a bigger role in his life, if you consider that Kashyap used to shack up at Ali's place while the latter was doing a post-grad course at Mumbai's Xavier Institute of Communications XIC.
This is also how Kashyap first met his key associate, Vikramaditya Motwane. (...) "I couldn't get into XIC, and was living in Imtiaz's room. Aarti Bajaj, my first wife and permanent editor for both mine and Imtiaz's films, was a year junior. Vikramaditya Motwane was Aarti's classmate. That's how we knew each other. But we really became friends during the shoot of [Deepa Mehta's] Water. Vikram was an assistant, and I was writing dialogues. The shoot got stalled [due to protests], and we spent a lot of time in Benares. Thereafter, I kept meeting him because he was first assistant director AD to Vishal Bhardwaj in his first film called Barf, before Maqbool - that never got made. (...) That was sometime around 2000. Vikram was one of the sound designers on Paanch. And because I was scared of shooting songs, and he had been Sanjay Leela Bhansali's assistant, I asked him to direct the songs. He had two credits in the film - sound designer, and director of songs. It was a first for many people - Bosco-Caesar as choreographer, (...) Aarti Bajaj as editor. Abbas Tyrewala was the lyricist in the film and Vishal Bhardwaj did the music. Both of them, Vikram, I and others, used to hang out together."
"Then, there was Sriram Raghavan (...) and a whole lot of others - part of another gang. Even Tigmanshu Dhulia, Irrfan and others were all close to my brother [Abhinav]. That was the third gang. I was the centre-point, everywhere. And then I had another friends' circle, with (...) Zoya Akhtar and the lot. When I wrote a script, I had way too many boards to bounce off. And that's what we did! I was a huge fan of Sriram Raghavan's Raman Raghav [a docu-drama on a serial killer that Kashyap remade in 2016]. (...) Then a strange thing happened, with a script I wrote officially, for the first time (...) - with Kamal Swaroop Om Dar-B-Dar as director. For that film, I found an actor I was a fan of from Delhi stage, called Manoj Bajpayee. I put the film together. But it never happened. Nobody was showing faith in Manoj. He was going through a hard time and doing Ram Gopal Varma's Daud, which is when Ramuji said he wanted to make a film [Satya] with Manoj. And asked if he knew of a writer for it. Without having seen any of my written works, Manoj took me to Ram Gopal Varma." (...)
But that he's also a liberal raconteur: "Oh, one of my favourite stories is about Mahesh Bhatt. He happened to me, right before Ram Gopal Varma. He got me to write films. And Mukesh Bhatt [his brother, and producer] was very miserly with money. I was struggling for rent. Pooja Bhatt was the nicest and kindest; I would tell her to talk to her dad. Then I just walked up to [Mahesh] Bhatt saab once and said that I'd rather be a carpenter than work in his office. With his brother [Mukesh] around, he didn't say a word. When I was leaving, he came down, said, - Don't ever change. - And he put Rs 10,000 in my hand. That was big money in 1994-1995." Years later, at a post-screening event in a film festival abroad, Kashyap was narrating the first part of the story above. He heard a voice from the audience. (...) "Bhatt saab was sitting in the crowd. I got so emotional. I have had funny incidents like these." (...) "There was a time when Mukul Anand was making Trimurti 1995. I wanted to work with him as an assistant. I would call his house land-line. Every call was a rupee gone. And he was always busy. Third time I said, - (...) [This is producer Subhash Ghai, tell him not to show up on the sets from tomorrow], - and hung up. Now when somebody trolls me on social media, I just remember my time!"
There is then the moment he randomly landed up at Shah Rukh Khan's bungalow Mannat he mistakenly calls it Jannat on Bandstand: "I was hungry and I walked into his house, using our college connection [both went to Hansraj in Delhi]. I remember him feeding me. He only knew how to make omelette." And then, there are the more famous spats: (...) "Karan Johar gave an interview calling me a psychopath. Till then we had not met. I called him a fat kid, who still thinks he is in school. (...) I also said something about Anil Kapoor in the interview that became a headline. But people always knew I was childlike." (...) He's gone to the extent of rescuing actor Rajpal Yadav from Andheri railway station, since he was returning to his hometown, having given up. That's when, Kashyap says, he first met the nondescript Nawazuddin Siddiqui, standing next to Yadav. (...) Scorsese, (...) after having watched GoW, invited him to be on the jury of the Marrakech film festival. Before Scorsese walked in, Kashyap was smoking outside with the Oscar winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, without knowing it was Sorrentino! Both were nervously puffing away. (...) Or this other time, Kashyap was in the same room as Francis Ford Coppola, "Sophia Coppola, his daughter, was with him. He is old. I kept staring at him for so long that he made me sit on his lap and said, now talk to me!".'
