'What was the run-up to Cannes like?
In my head I was not even looking at Cannes. (...) Marco Müller literally forced me to show him Wasseypur. I was surprised they liked it.
Did it screen as one film at Cannes?
It was screened together. I remember I was very nervous when the film was playing. I just sat outside for five hours, drinking. I didn’t think this is the kind of movie that plays at festivals. (...) The reception was crazy. They showed the movies back-to-back, with just a 10-minute break, but everyone stayed. There was total madness. The actors were getting stopped on the street. We were dancing late into the night.
Is the film more personal than it might appear at first? You shot a lot of it in your childhood town.
It is a very personal interpretation of the real story. We could not shoot in Wasseypur. The budget was very controlled. The only way I could maximise everything was to go back to where I grew up. I used all my father’s goodwill he had accumulated over the years to make the film. People opened their houses because of my dad, and because of them feeling I am one from amongst them who’s now making movies. I shot in the house I grew up in. The house where Richa Chadha gives birth is where my brother was born. The imagery is from my childhood: the mountain I used to sit on, the mines, Tashkent Colony. The powerhouses my father worked on are there in the film. The sequence with the first fridge, the way the family sits together, the way the singer adopts male and female voices - those things I grew up with. (...) I was very affected by a six-hour movie called The Best Of Youth (2003), which chronicled the history of Italy. I thought, this is an opportunity to tell the political history of Bihar. We shot a lot of material that we later took out - I got carried away with the politics of the land and the history of the mines. (...) I was averse to making a gangster film. After Satya (1998) and Black Friday (2004), I thought, what is left to be told? But I found these gangsters to be very funny and childish. (...)
It marked a decisive shift for the genre. The gangster film largely moved out of Mumbai after this.
I was very excited about making what I thought would be a commercial hit. I was genuinely not thinking about anything else. I just wanted to tell a very north Indian story, with north Indian humour. We wrote the first film before shooting; the second was written while shooting the first. UTV [Motion Pictures] backed out three days before the shoot. We were there with little money and little time. We couldn’t have gone and just come back. When you are working with a controlled budget, you come back with a finished film, otherwise it will never get made. (...)
Would you have made it with bigger stars if you could?
No. That’s the reason UTV didn’t work out, because they wanted bigger stars. They had talked to some. What happens with a bigger star is you have to have a definite story, a heroic ending - and you can’t have them play an idiot. Everyone comes with a sense of entitlement. It wouldn’t have been the same. I was so fixed on Nawazuddin [Siddiqui] and Huma Qureshi. I didn’t see anyone else but Nawaz. On the first day of shooting, there was a massive problem because he decided to play Faizal like a gangster. I had to stop shooting. Nawaz and I went back to the hotel and had green tea and a long discussion. I said, this man knows he’s a gangster, he doesn’t have to act like one. (...)
Is there anything you would re-do?
Just the climax, with blood pouring out of Ramadhir’s body... oh god. When I watch it, I want to kill myself.
Was it always planned as two films?
At one point it was almost a three-parter. Then [Vikramaditya] Motwane cut it down. (...) He took the soundtrack of The Dark Knight (2008) and cut the montages to that (Motwane remembers editing to the score of the 2009 film Moon).
It’s altogether rare today to find a Hindi film like this, where all the primary characters are Muslim.
Yeah. I don’t think you could make a Wasseypur today. (...) (The censors) did not cut anything in Wasseypur. Only one sequence where Danish knifes a man in the eye, they asked to mute the sound because it was too gruesome. Kudos to (censor board head) Pankaja Thakur, who said, this film is an authentic representation and it will not be cut. (...)
What effect do you think ‘Wasseypur’ has had on Hindi cinema in these 10 years?
I don’t know if it’s a positive or negative effect. There’s so much north Indian gangster stuff now - a lot of it is nowhere close to how it is (in real life). Unfortunately, what people borrowed from Wasseypur is abuses. (...)
If you made ‘Wasseypur’ today, would it be a series?
Definitely. I like the long format, and there was much more story to be told. There are a lot of my movies I would have done as series if OTT had existed then.
A decade later, how do you regard the film?
I know why I made the film but I don’t understand why people go crazy about it. (...) I don’t think any of the actors except Manoj Bajpayee got paid, it was made for such a low cost. It did not stay at the box office, it was pushed out by a Salman Khan movie. (...) People keep expecting me to make the same film. It has derailed me in a way. Everything I do is compared to that. It confuses me, because I do not want to make another gangster movie'.
