Anurag Singh Kashyap (born 10 September 1972) is an Indian film director and screenwriter. As a director, he is known for Black Friday (2004), a controversial and award-winning Hindi film about the 1993 Bombay bombings, followed by No Smoking (2007), Dev D (2009) and Gulaal (2009). As a screenwriter, he wrote the scripts for the Filmfare Award-winning Satya (1998) and the Academy Award-nominated Canadian film Water (2005).
In 1999, Kashyap won the Best Screenplay award for Satya at the Star Screen Awards. The next year, his short film Last Train to Mahakali won the Special Jury Award at the same awards. His feature film debut Black Friday won the Grand Jury Prize at the 3rd Annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (2005), and was a nominee for the Golden Leopard (Best Film) at the 57th Locarno International Film Festival (2004). Recently, he announced his association with Tumbhi where he and his team will make 6 short films for Tumbhi and start his blog with them as well – Anurag’s official blog(2010). He was listed on the The DNA power list: Top 50 influentials , a list of 50 most influential Indians in 2011.
Early life
Anurag Kashyap was born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, where his father worked for the state electricity board. He grew up in several cities, including Varanasi, Saharanpur, and Obra. He did his early schooling in Dehradun, and age eight onwards, at the Scindia School in Gwalior.
He was fascinated with films right from childhood, and even at age five, would watch Hindi films like Kora Kagaz and Aandhi at a nearby film club and open-air theater. This came to an end once he began his schooling.
Due to Kashyap’s desire to become a scientist, he 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. During his college days, he started watching films again, and also got involved with drugs and alcohol. He was confused and depressed, and had joined a street theater group, Jana Natya Manch; he ended up doing a lot of street plays. The same year, a couple of friends introduced him to world cinema; they “urged [him] to catch a de Sica retrospective” at the International Film Festival of India. In ten days, he ended up seeing a total of 55 films at the festival, and de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves was the film that influenced him the most; watching it “was an epiphany.”
“from all different perspectives and in a way you can say that these films changed my life and it’s meaning completely for me. Just that one film festival and I decided that this is what I want to be a part of – in next five months I was in Mumbai”.
Career
The film festival and de Sica made a deep impact on Kashyap – he wanted to do something with films – and so he landed in Mumbai in June 1993 with INR 5,000-6,000 in his pocket. The money ran out after he stayed for a couple of days in a “good hotel.” He spent the next eight months on the streets, staying in lofts, “sleeping on beaches,” “under a water tank and in the St Xavier’s [college] boys hostel.” He managed to find work at Prithvi Theatre, but his first play remained incomplete because the director died. He then joined Makrand Deshpande’s troupe – Samrangan – but left because he “could not face life. [He] wanted to act but [he] couldn’t act with all that frustration.”
Kashyap then wrote an “eight-page drama”—Main (I)—which did well at college drama festivals, and people advised him to pursue a career in writing. Kashyap’s play was appreciated by directors like Govind Nihalani and Saeed Mirza. Nihalani was working on a television series based on classic works, and he gave Kashyap a couple of books—a play by Henrik Ibsen, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial—so that he could write scripts based on them. Kashyap read The Trial and told Nihalani that the book could only be made into an animation film, not a regular one. Nihalani asked him to reconsider. But the books had “confused [Kashyap] so much that [he] started thinking that [he] didn’t know anything!” Kashyap started avoiding Nihalani; he went into “hibernation for a year and a half, and kept reading.”
In 1995, an acquaintance introduced Kashyap to Shivam Nair, director of the 2006 film Ahista Ahista. The day they met, Kashyap watched Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver at Nair’s place—on a “bad vcr” and using a “mutilated tape”; the film fascinated him. “I want to write something,” Kashyap told Nair, and spent the next few days sitting in a corner as people like Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan and Shiv Subramaniam discussed things. Sridhar introduced him to the world of books—authors like James M. Cain. The team was working on two projects, one of which was a docu-drama, 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 penned by Subramaniam was not “working.” Kashyap rewrote the script, and got credit for the same, and the second film was scrapped. But Kashyap had now proved himself, and so got access to a VCR and television set. He starting bringing in video tapes and spent many days watching films. Kashyap got his first major break when actor Manoj Bajpai, who was working on Daud showed Auto Narayan to producer-director Ramgopal Varma. Varma liked Kashyap’s work and hired him to write the script for Satya.
In September 1993, while Kashyap stayed at the St. Xavier’s Boys Hostel, he used to hang out with the members of a band—Greek (later Pralay). He took copious notes on how they lead their lives—forty pages of a small notebook, and began writing the script—"in bits and pieces"—for a film that he called Mirage but which would later become Paanch. Kashyap had seen ex-VJ Luke Kenny in a Vikram Kapadia play, and approached him with an incomplete script, but nothing came out of it. Later on, while working with Nair, he came across files related to the Joshi-Abhyankar Serial Murders that took place in Pune in 1976.
“Five very ordinary college kids viciously murdered nine people. I got what I needed to finish my script then.”
He had also seen a film, Fun, about two mentally unstable girls murdering an elderly woman. And Paanch was ready to be made into a film. Kashyap says—
“There was a structuring in Fun, which you will also see in Paanch. There was something in Fun. When I began looking for it, I saw a pattern in Last Train to Mahakali, in my own film Paanch and in Auto Narayan. All three films had a similar formula. I am able to analyze it because I have.
Satya was a commercial and critical success, and Kashyap collaborated with Varma on a few more films writing the screenplay and dialogues for Kaun? (1999) and the dialogues for Shool (1999). He also wrote the dialogues for Mani Ratnam’s Yuva (2004). Kashyap made his directorial debut with Paanch, with Kay Kay Menon as the lead in 2000. However, the film ran into trouble with the Indian censor board and hasn’t been released to date. In 2007, he adapted Stephen King’s 1978 short story “Quitters, Inc.” as No Smoking, which despite being received well by critics, didn’t do well at the box-office. This was followed by Return of Hanuman (previously Hanuman Returns) a Hindi animation film about adventures of the Hindu god Hanuman.
Then, in 2009, came Dev.D. Written and directed by him, the film is a modern day take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic Bengali novel Devdas, previously adapted for the screen by such revered filmmakers as P.C. Barua and Bimal Roy, and more recently by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Dev.D was embraced by the media, critics and public alike, and is considered to be amongst path-breaking films in Hindi for the way it presented itself.
In March 2009, while announcing steering away from screenwriting, after his current assignments to concentrate on direction, Kashyap also announced two new film projects, Bombay Velvet, a thriller based on real incidents in 1960s, to be produced by Danny Boyle starring Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan and John Abraham, followed by Doga, based on the Raj Comics super hero.
In 2010 he played a child abuser in Onir’s I Am, revealing that the role was meaningful to him because he had been sexually abused as a child. His next film as a director is That Girl in Yellow Boots.
Personal
Anurag was earlier married to Aarti — his college sweetheart whom he dated for nine years before getting married. They have a daughter Aaliya. On 30 April 2011, Kashyap got married to Kalki Koechlin at Kalki’s maternal home in Ooty. They first met during the making of Dev D. Both Anurag and Kalki collaborated on making of the movie, Shaitan.
His younger brother Abhinav Kashyap is also a screenwriter/ director and made his directorial debut in 2010 with the blockbuster Dabangg starring Salman Khan. Abhinav also co-wrote the script with Anurag for the Sanjay Gupta directed film Jung starring Sanjay Dutt and Jackie Shroff. —Wikipedia
