Anurag Kashyap spoke about filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali in a new interview. He also revealed Sanjay’s reaction to his film Dev D (2009), which came out a few years after the filmmaker’s Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Devdas (2002) was released. Both films are based on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic Bengali novel Devdas. However, Sanjay ‘hated’ Anurag’s adaptation of Devdas, the latter revealed in a new interview. Also read: Anurag Kashyap recalls he ‘deleted Tinder’ after meeting Guneet Monga on dating app
Anurag Kashyap said that Sanjay did not like Dev D, and even said that he had ‘ruined Chandramukhi and Paro’. In Sanjay’s Devdas, Aishwarya Rai was seen as Paro, childhood friend of Shah Rukh’s Devdas, while Madhuri Dixit was seen as his confidant Chandramukhi, a courtesan. In Anurag’s modern-day adaptation of the Bengali classic, set in contemporary Punjab and Delhi, Mahi Gill played Abhay’s childhood sweetheart, while Chanda (Kalki Koechlin) was a sex worker.
When asked what Sanjay thought of Dev D, Anurag said in a recent interview with Unfiltered By Samdish, “He (Sanjay Leela Bhansali) hated it. He said you have ruined Chandramukhi and Paro. He didn’t say it to me, he said it to Vikram (Vikramaditya Motwane), who was his assistant and a co-writer on Dev D… Bhansali is a genius. When it comes to music, choreography, he is just a freaking genius. And now, he has also discovered violence. In Gangubai (Alia Bhatt‘s 2022 film Gangubai Kathiawadi) he showed violence. I was so happy about it, I went and told him ‘tu apne limitations se bahar nikla (you are now coming out of your limitations)’.
Anurag further spoke about how he had once written a piece about Black (2005) for a magazine that had left Sanjay upset. Anurag said the filmmaker, who had directed the Rani Mukerji and Amitabh Bachchan-starrer, thought he was ‘his enemy’. When asked if he liked Black, Anurag said, “I didn’t. I didn’t believe it. And I wrote about it, why I didn’t believe it, which upset him (Sanjay) a lot. That writing was not supposed to be for publication as that was personal to him. Ab wapis hum dost ho gaye hain. Woh ice wapas break ho gaya, mujhe karna pada khud jaa ke (we are friends again after I went and broke the ice with him)… He (Anurag) is a very reserved person, he is also very awkward in public. I keep telling him he needs to let go of that… He takes a lot of time to trust someone. He also deals with his own trauma. He has very closely seen the film industry as a kid, and that he hated.”
Anurag’s last film, Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat, featured Alaya F and debutant Karan Mehta in lead roles. It was released on February 3. The film marked Anurag’s return to the romantic musical genre with music composer Amit Trivedi, with whom he had teamed up for Dev D.
