A chance viewing of de Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves' opened a floodgate for a young Delhi University student.
He worked in the local theatre scene, moved to Bombay, often wrote films without any credits and is now a familiar face in global cinema.
Happy Birthday, @anuragkashyap72!
Anurag Kashyap chucked his Zoology ambitions and arrived in Mumbai in 1993 with Rs. 5000 in his pocket which he soon exhausted.
He slept on benches and shacked up at the hostel room of Imtiaz Ali, who was doing his post-grad at Xavier Institute of Communications.
At XIC, Anurag Kashyap met two of his longtime collaborators.
Aarti Bajaj was a year junior to Imtiaz Ali. She worked as an editor for both Imtiaz Ali and Anurag Kashyap for almost all of their films.
Bajaj's classmate was someone called Vikramaditya Motwane.
In the late ‘90s, Anurag Kashyap took over a movie based on the life of “Auto Shankar”, a serial killer from Madras.
Though the film never saw the light of the day, it did reach to Ram Gopal Verma, who gave Anurag Kashyap his biggest break back then, a film called 'Satya'.
When @RGVzoomin was shooting for Daud, he discussed his next venture and asked Manoj Bajpayee whether he could suggest a writer.
Bajpayee took Anurag Kashyap to RGV's office without even seeing any of his work.
Satya changed Kashyap's life. He called it his "film school".
Apart from writing, Anurag Kashyap also did casting for RGV.
One day, he met Rajpal Yadav, who was so disappointed with Bollywood that he was leaving for Jabalpur. He offered him a one-scene role in ‘Shool’.
Standing next to him that day was someone called Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
In 2003, Anurag Kashyap turned director with 'Paanch', loosely based on the Joshi-Abhyankar serial murders.
The film had an ensemble crew. Abbas Tyrewala wrote the lyrics, set to tune by Vishal Bharadwaj.
Paanch also marked Bosco Caesar's first film as a choreographer.
Due to its controversial content, Paanch never got a theatrical release.
His next film was 'Black Friday', based on the 1993 Mumbai blasts, coincidentally the year when he first set foot in the city.
The film was initially conceptualized as a series for Aaj Tak who backed out.
Black Friday got into a legal entanglement. The Supreme Court finally gave a verdict allowing its release after three years in 2007.
Anurag Kashyap later said that the entire ordeal destroyed his honesty.
It's a brutally truthful film with a superlative album by Indian Ocean.
Apart from Black Friday, 2007 saw the release of two other films by Anurag Kashyap.
'No Smoking' was the first ever Hindi film to be adapted from a Stephen King work.
Between the release of Black Friday and No Smoking, his animated project 'Return of Hanuman' hit the theaters.
A couple of years later, his next two films, 'Dev.D' and 'Gulaal' got released.
Dev.D was an adaptation of Devdas while Gulaal was a medley of poetry and politics set in Rajasthan.
Both the films had exquisite music. Dev.D was also the first major project of Amit Trivedi.
During the making of Gulaal, all of them travelled to Jaipur during Diwali for six years to complete the night time shoot as the city gets decked up during those ten days.
A major portion of the film is thus a continuous Diwali. Anurag Kashyap called Gulaal his "angriest film".
The controversial "That Girl in Yellow Boots" starring Kalki Koechlin and Naseeruddin Shah followed soon.
Roger Ebert in a review, wrote of him as "a leader of a growing independent film movement in India."
Anurag Kashyap then laid his hands upon the epic Gangs of Wasseypur.
It was Zeeshan Quadri (seen in the role of 'Definite') who presented Anurag Kashyap with the paper clippings of the story of Wasseypur.
The final material was a 150-page novel by Quadri. Kashyap turned it into a 240-page script.
In India the film was released in two parts.
Clocking at nearly 320 minutes, Gangs of Wasseypur was India's first mainstream film to be screened in the Director's Fortnight section at Cannes, to a standing ovation.
In 2019, it became the only Indian film to feature in @guardian list of 100 Best Films of the 21st century.
Kashyap's next outing was 'Ugly', which also premiered in Cannes.
He would get involved in a mammoth project called 'Bombay Velvet'. The film made on a high budget turned out to be a box office dud.
This failure forced him to direct Raman Ragav 2.0 on a shoestring budget.
Anurag Kashyap once told, "I am a child of Martin Scorsese who fantasizes about Quentin Tarantino's films."
Thelma Schoonmaker, the Academy Award-winning editor who has been working with Scorsese for more than five decades, edited the international cut of Bombay Velvet.
Kashyap's last few projects, apart from Mukkabaaz and Manmarziyaan, have been made for Netflix.
This includes both the seasons of Sacred Games to his latest Choked.
In between, he also directed a segment of both Lust Stories and Ghost Stories, a reunion after Bombay Talkies.
Many film personalities of today's Bollywood, outside the 'star' system, owe their success to Anurag Kashyap.
Both Neeraj Ghaywan and Vicky Kaushal assisted him on Gangs of Wasseypur.
Vicky Kaushal would feature prominently in Neeraj Ghaywan's directorial debut 'Masaan'.
During the making of GoW, Anurag Kashyap, Mukesh Chhabra et al were looking for local actors from UP-Bihar.
A young actor stepped into Kashyap's office asking for a role. The casting had just been completed and Kashyap could not offer him a role despite fitting the bill.
Abhishek Kapoor was looking for an actor then, who has worked on TV before. Chhabra got an audition tape of this young actor and sent him.
This is how #SushantSinghRajput made his debut through 'Kai Po Che'.
SSR's last film 'Dil Bechara' is Mukesh Chhabra's directorial debut.
A few years later, Anurag Kashyap got in touch with Sushant Singh Rajput for his film 'Mukkabaaz'.
He was looking for an actor who can play someone from eastern UP.
SSR said he would get back. In the meantime, the biopic on MS Dhoni became a hit and Rajput never got back.
Anurag Kashyap's story is inspirational for all strugglers in Bollywood.
He went on record talking of his depression, his failed marriage with Aarti Bajaj and his alcoholism.
From writing scripts within a night to cutting cake with Quentin Tarantino, it has been quite a ride!
Thanks for reading this thread.
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