Anurag Kashyap Talks About Upcoming Cannes Title ‘Kennedy’, How He Was ‘Bored’ Of Creating Gangster Movies

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who is known for creating the 'Gangs of Wasseypur', 'Ugly', 'Gulaal' and 'No Smoking', is all set to visit the French Riviera as his next film 'Kennedy', starring Sunny Leone and Rahul Bhat, has been picked for the Cannes Film Festival. 

Ahead of the film’s premiere, the filmmaker addressed how he spent the majority of the last few years working on others’ films to avoid repeating himself. But now he has returned to his familiar territory with the upcoming noir-thriller ‘Kennedy’.

In an interview with Variety, Kashyap talked about the tumultuous last few years amid the ‘Phantom fiasco’, and described his return to ‘Kennedy’, which as per him, is ‘a character-driven dark nightmare thriller about redemption’.

He said, “I’ve liked everything that I’ve done. Personally, I will not do what I don’t want to do. But sometimes in between, after Psycho Raman came a phase where this whole Phantom fiasco that happened, the lockdown that happened, there were a lot of things going on…” For the unversed, Phantom Studios’ dissolution was announced in 2018. It was founded by Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Vikas Bahl and Madhu Mantena. Later, Kashyap founded his new production company, Good Bad Films.

In the past few years, Kashyap has directed the romantic drama ‘Manmarziyaan’ and the science-fiction film ‘Dobaaraa’. Revealing the only film conceptualised by him during this time was ‘Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat’, Kashyap said, “I worked a lot on other people’s scripts. I wrote a lot of other people’s scripts and only one that I wrote was Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat, which was an idea that originated out of nowhere and I wanted to explore that because I was bored of people always expecting me to go back and create another gangster movie. Unless you get something new and exciting that happens, why would I do it?”.

For Kashyap, this isn’t his first Cannes outing. His magnum opus 'Gangs of Wasseypur' was screened at the 2012 Cannes Directors' Fortnight. His 'Raman Raghav 2.0' also premiered in the Director's Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.