Anurag Kashyap on Choked: On demonetisation day, I was also very happy

Anurag Kashyap is not a person who knows how not to speak his mind. Trolls don't like Kashyap, they get after him for everything and anything he tweets, but he has learnt to ignore all of it now. Occasionally, he drops one of his wit-laced missiles on Twitter and shuts the troll up. But Kashyap calls himself 'neither Left nor Right nor Centre' on Twitter, like his movies.

One of those neither-Left-nor-Right-nor-Centre movies drops on Netflix on June 5. Anurag Kashyap's topic here is just about three years old: the demonetisation. In Choked, Kashyap takes Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew and his audience through a range of emotions from joy to defeat and victory, while saying what he needs to say.

We connected with Anurag over a video call on a June morning, and got down to discussing a wide range of topics from politics, to the pandemic, to people's belief in Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and, of course, Choked.

Excerpts from the conversation:

I want to take you back to 2017, when you addressed a crowd at Thyagaraja Stadium. You said about Udaan: the people who loved Udaan, watched it on their laptops. That does not bring in revenue. 10 years later, we are sitting across a pair of laptops, in a world where this has become the only reality. How has your cinema changed, how have you adapted your filmmaking for this 4x6 inch audience?

I think I was quite prepared for it. I have been trained for it. Earlier also, when films would come out, people would watch it more after downloading it or Torrenting it. So, I make a film like I am supposed to make a film and people have the choice whether they want to watch it or not. The main thing for me about Netflix is that, it has not just changed the way I make movies, it has allowed me to offer and share the dignity and self-worth with the people who work for me. For instance, in a film like Udaan, almost everyone worked for the film for film. I don't think Vikramaditya Motwane got paid for the film. Ronit Roy took absolute pay cut and crew members had minimum wage because the film was made under the cost of Rs 2 to Rs 3 crore. Or even a film like Gulaal, where nobody took any money. People did films for the love of the movie, for love of me, for love of the script, for the love of each other.

Today it is not the same. Today, I have the appropriate amount of money that I need to make a film, based on the script and content, not based on who is in it. And I can pay the actual wages and I can pay people money that allows them to live their life with dignity and self-worth, and they are not doing charity for me. And I am not under any obligation. So, that's the revenue that a film generates for me beforehand so I can share it with everyone, and then we have the right way of making a movie.

Like, Choked is a very uncompromised film. We created the interior set of the house and shot on green screen to create the right atmosphere, and that shows in the film. Everybody talks about the technicality and how did we achieve it. Because we get the right amount, we aren't compromising, we aren't stealing shots, we are doing things the right way.

Anurag Kashyap: Choked is the summing up of the entire demonetisation

This pandemic, of course, has been the test of all kinds of filmmaking. Which side of this theatre vs OTT release debate do you find yourself on?

I think both cinema and OTT will co-exist. My thing with the theatre owners is that, they think that the films that should have released in theatres and are coming out on OTT, and they are reacting to it. But the thing is when cinemas will open, there will be such a bottleneck of movies, that there will be struggle. I have suffered when Gangs of Wasseypur was nine days in cinemas and Ek Tha Tiger came out, and the film was doing well, but it was totally thrown out of cinemas. So when the discussion is happening, discussions are the reactions to movies like Gulabo Sitabo and Shakuntala Devi, who have big stars in them. I haven't heard that kind of discussion for a movie like Bamfaad Or Eeb Allay Ooo. Nobody is asking where are these films. That's also a very self-serving fight. If you are self-serving, then everybody else has the right to be self-serving. People have to look out for their own recoveries.

Your art has always been kind of unsettling. Black Friday, Ugly, Gulaal, Gangs, all of them. You have also said that you make films to disturb the audience. Do you think you sort of balanced that unsettling the audience with a, sort of, happy ending, in Choked?

In the dynamics of the film, you need an ending to sum it up. The sequence when the raid happens, that's the point when you realise everybody was getting the money and the happy ending is the end of an actual process. I spoke to a lot of income-tax people, income-tax officers also, and somebody who points the tax department towards the money, they get the 10 per cent reward, they get that letter. So, we just wanted a normal ending. Some things have due process in our system and I cannot take away the due process to serve an end that I want them to disturb them and say that in the end nothing happens. It does happen, that one thing is in place. So, it needed to come to a natural end like that. If the film didn't have the demonetisation angle to it, the ending would have been different.

You have been a vocal critic of a lot of things that this government has been doing for the past six years now. And demonetisation was that rare occasion when you actually praised the government. But then, of course, everything sort of fell apart. The reports started coming out...

Yes, yes, I did. But then you get a perspective on it. When your leader, your Prime Minister makes an announcement that affects all of us, the normal assumption, the normal reaction is that they have thought it through. It's not an impulsive decision. There is administrative services, there is a department, the whole ministry, that must have been planning it for 8-9 months, everything would be in place, before they implement a decision, right? But that wasn't so, we realised that he has given us 4 hours and then kept extending the deadline, changing the amount of money you can withdraw and you realise there was no plan. And since then, we have seen it happening non-stop. All the decisions are last moment. The lockdown, CAA-NRC, everything is just so impulsive and then and there. Announce it today, implement tomorrow and then force it on to people. I still remember when the day the lockdown was announced, my first tweet was what about the migrants. And I was trolled mercilessly for saying that.

This is also because when you are so isolated from the reality, from what is happening on the ground, that from your ivory tower, you can comment 'how does it matter'.

You see, just 7 per cent people are on Twitter. I wonder if the migrants on the streets who are suffering are even aware if there is a Twitter, they probably don't have a smartphone. Hum log ghar par baithke baatein kar rahe hai, hum log sadak pe nahi hai.

I saw Choked is for Shubhra Shetty. What is the story there?

She was the one who brought the script to me and this around 2015 and she didn't see a lot of my films because she says that she gets disturbed by them. And she said if you made this movie, I will watch it. So, I made this film, it was like a thank you. She has watched it now and she is very happy with it.

In the past, the Censor Board has tried 'choking' your work, so to say. If you were to release Choked in a theatre today, what all do you think the Censor Board would have objected to?

I think Choked would have realised easily. My relationship with the Censor Board has been tumultuous but there has always been a process in place. So until Udta Punjab happened, until Pahlaj Nihalani was the head of the Censor Board, because none of films got censored before that, none of my films got cut. I had different kinds of battles - take the no smoking sign out of Ugly. But I have never had that kind of battle where my film eventually did not come out, but suddenly after that, in Udta Punjab the fight happened. If Mukkabaaz can be cleared by the censors... Choked is not a propaganda film or anti-something. It is a about an event, it is a very objective film. I don't see any reason why Choked would have had that kind of battle. I happy that it is coming out on Netflix. In my head, I was making the film and Netflix is the right platform because it will reach the right audience at the right time.

Watch Choked trailer here:

The tussle between Sarita and Sushant is essentially a lot of homes in the post-2014 India. Who is the believer in your family? How do you deal with them?

I have a lot of people who are total believers. We disagree... we agree to disagree. Now they don't discuss things; earlier they would say that 'don't say this', 'don't say that', but now they have stopped. They are letting me be. A lot of them are still confused. A lot of them still feel like... their actual feelings are very different now. A lot of people still believe in Mr Modi, but they think Mr Amit Shah is making him look bad. Or someone else is making him look bad...

There's a sort of disillusionment...

There is this disillusionment, but there is also somebody else to blame for this disillusionment. In many people's heads, the Prime Minister is incorruptible, but the people around him are making him look bad. When I see tweets also, they say the states are letting him down in handling the pandemic, but he's the one doing his best. So all those things happen. Everybody has their own opinion, and I don't like to force my opinion on people. I genuinely believe that only life experiences teach people the truth about everything. People always understand everything in retrospect. And I got it differently on demonetisation in retrospect. On the day of it, I was also one of those guys who were actually very happy.

Yes, but then, we all saw how it turned out, and then we have Choked as a summing up of whatever happened...

Yes, Choked is a summing up of what happened.

All these complaints, these abuses, these 'you should die', this and that type of comments on Twitter that you get...

I ignore it. I totally ignore it. When I tweet something, I don't read a reply. Sometimes people I follow, when they reply, that also comes on the other feed, very rarely I go and, you know... I don't read them.

And occasionally, you throw those missiles!

Ya, occasionally, but abhi kam ho gaya hai. Abhi I spend even less time on it.

(The writer tweets as @ananya116)

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