In a recent interview with DNA India, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap opened up about his 2015 film Bombay Velvet, which was a critical and commercial disaster, ruing that he let actor Ranbir Kapoor down. The filmmaker, who recently appeared in AR Murugadoss’ Akira as bad cop ACP Rane, spoke of his experience in front of the camera and what he goes through behind one.
Bombay Velvet, released in May last year, was made at a budget of Rs 120 crores. However, it managed to garner just a little more than Rs 34 crores at the box office, in spite of having a star cast such as Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, Kay Kay Menon, and director Karan Johar in a negative role. The film, that was loosely based on historian Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables, was dubbed one of Kashyap’s worst.
Kashyap said, “I had gone into depression. There was a time I started feeling that the floods were because of me, the drought was because of me, the accidents here and there are happening because of Anurag Kashyap. People have attacked me and rightly so. But I have learnt from my mistakes. I don’t think I will ever try making a film like Bombay Velvet anymore where the production costs will become invisible. Creating Mumbai in itself meant so much money and I didn’t realise it then.”
Kashyap also revealed that he felt equally responsible for all the flak Ranbir Kapoor faced. “I think we, as a team, have let him down in many ways. Ranbir is a fantastic artist, a brilliant human being and an actor who wanted to try out something different. He wanted to experiment which not many stars would want to do. And we failed him terribly. I feel completely responsible for this. Not just him, now when I hear studios shutting, I somewhere feel that I am definitely one of the reasons behind it. When the stories come up and there’s Bombay Velvet‘s poster right at the top of the article, it does hurt,” he was quoted by DNA.
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Interestingly, Ranbir Kapoor’s film after Bombay Velvet – Tamasha – did fairly well at the box office and was lauded for his performance as the erratically behaving Ved. His upcoming film, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil with Anushka Sharma and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, is slated for a Diwali release this year. The teaser of the film is much talked-about in Bollywood now.
Kashyap, on the other hand, has had an eventful year, beginning with his brush with the CBFC for Udta Punjab, a film made under his production house Phantom Films, and his film on a serial killer Raman Raghav 2.0. Speaking about his recent role in Akira, the director said that while he was uncomfortable to act in front of the camera, he would do so if he was offered an ‘obscene amount of money’.
Feature Image Courtesy: Deccan Chronicle