Anurag Kashyap talked about his 2015 big budget film Bombay Velvet and said that working on it after shooting was the “worst experience” of his life. He shared that the production company put a lot of pressure on him to recover the huge budget, which made the whole process very stressful and upsetting.
The film, which was made on a whopping Rs 90 crore budget, earned just Rs 43.20 crore worldwide. Reflecting on that phase, Kashyap said he learned his biggest lesson to never get trapped in the pressure of scale or expectations again. “I understood my audience, and then I started working backwards. I asked the production house, ‘how much money will you give me if I don’t tell you what is the script, and I don’t tell you who I will cast in the film, but you feel that I will recover the money.’ This was 2016 post-Bombay Velvet. They gave me Rs 3.5 crore. After Rs 90 crore I went straight to Rs 3.5 crore because I didn’t want to get trapped. Many of my filmmaker friends and even my brother… so when you make a big film and that didn’t work you get trapped. After that, you keep trying to prove one point your whole life — about trying to make a hit big film,” he recalled.
Candidly naming Bombay Velvet as the film where he felt most let down, he revealed, “Bombay Velvet is the biggest example. Everyone was scared. They found the film’s length very long, they wanted me to cut the childhood story of the lead actors. They wanted me to do all of these things because the film’s cost was a lot more. The opening on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was more important than the film itself, which is why I got nervous even before the release of the film. I had to cut the film. If I would have retained those 25 minutes, it would have been a better film and maybe it would not have seen this much loss.”
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Calling the experience a “source of trauma”, Kashyap admitted that it haunted him for years. “If I could have owned this failure, this film wouldn’t have been a trauma for me. It became a trauma for me.” When asked if it was the worst experience in his 32-year career, Anurag replied, “Yes, in the post-production stage, not the shooting. I went on the back foot. This was the first time I saw so much negativity in my life.”
About Bombay Velvet
Bombay Velvet is inspired by historian Gyan Prakash’s book Mumbai Fables and stars Ranbir Kapoor, Anushka Sharma, and Karan Johar (in his acting debut), along with Kay Kay Menon, Manish Choudhary, Vivaan Shah, and Siddhartha Basu in supporting roles.
Released on May 15, 2015, the film was made on a massive budget of around Rs 120 crore but earned only about Rs 23 crore in its first week. It received mixed reviews and ended up being a major box office flop.
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