Anurag Kashyap has said that some people are getting higher budgets and salaries by calling their film pan-India, without having any central core in their stories. He added that KGF and Baahubali nver set out to be pan-India films when they were released.
Last year, Anurag Kashyap had said that the trend of pan-India films such as Pushpa and Kantara has destroyed Bollywood as the Hindi film has been constantly trying to emulate the success of these films without making rooted cinema. His statements were miscontrued by Vivek Agnihotri and the two were involved in a war of words on X, then known as Twitter.
Now, in a recent interview, the Gangs of Wasseypur director has justified his statement with the example of Upendra and Kiccha Sudeep-starrer pan-India film Kabzaa, which tanked at the box office earlier this year. He also stated that the pan-India phenomenon is nothing new and has been there since the days of Rajinikanth, Chiranjeevi, and Kamal Haasan.
Talking to Zoom, Kashyap said, "I have said something that I feel. In time, either people will see what I was trying to say or I will see that I was wrong. I have seen examples. Each pan-India film that has worked, it never set out to be pan-India. When KGF one was out, it wasn’t called a pan-India film. It was dubbed in Hindi and released by Excel Entertainment. Baahubali wasn’t called that either, it was dubbed and released. Pan-India term was created for the sake of business, not for cinema."
"Who is benefiting from it? Very few people. By saying pan-India they are getting higher budgets, some people are getting higher salaries, but the cost that is going into the film. Pan-India becomes enough for them to say it is a ‘big shot’ film, without any central core of the story. For one pan-India hit film, for one hit of KGF, how many Kabzaa’s are there? Or other films that came out with high budgets, same shots, similar kind of things, with everything repeated. Compare the money that a hit film has made and the losses the other film has made. When you weigh them, you realise the industry has lost money. Similarly in Telugu and everywhere else. So I am very scared of these trends which start", the filmmaker added.
Sharing his thoughts that the pan-India phenomenon is not recent, Kashyap stated, "It started with Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth and then slowly it went on to Mani Ratnam and Shankar. We have seen that happen, but every time it has happened, it has happened for sometime. There was Pratibandh, Aaj Ka Gunda Raj, but after that we didn’t see Chiranjeevi in a Hindi film. There are expectations, some films benefit from it but after that it goes down. Because nobody is working on the script and the story that they should work on, there are very few filmmakers who are doing that."
Meanwhile, on the work front, Anurag Kashyap will be seen next in front of the camera in a negative role in Haddi, which is headlined by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. The revenge drama is a direct-to-digital release and will premiere on ZEE5 on September 7.
READ | Kalki Koechlin says she is 'at ease' with her ex-husband Anurag Kashyap: 'We've been through so much together'
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 "Anurag Kashyap/File photo")
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