Anurag Kashyap opened up recently about his long-awaited series Maximum City, based on a book of the same name by Suketu Mehta and said that it got shelved six days before they were supposed to begin prep. He had already worked on the show for more than 1.5 years in order to write it. Post that, however, he got onto writing another film and that turned out to be the cop-thriller Kennedy.
Recently in a chat for the Cinema House event in G5A Foundation, Mumbai, Anurag opened up on Maximum City being one project that was hardest to let go of. He mentioned that Kennedy was in-fact built from the bits and pieces of another stalled project from the 2000s. Director Sudhir Mishra had hired him to work on a film titled, Uss Raat Achanak, starring Sanjay Dutt and Tejaswini Kolhapure. Sanjay’s character was inspired from a cop from the 1980s, going by the name of Uday Shetty, which is also the name of the protagonist in Kennedy.
He said, “I was very taken in by the character; he intrigued me a lot and I always wanted to use him. I even tried to do it many times. I once convinced (cinematographer-turned-filmmaker) Rajeev Ravi that I’ll write it and asked him to make it in Malayalam. In different scenarios and different times I was trying to put in Uday Shetty.”
However, it didn’t take shape and then Covid-19 lockdown took place. “During that time, I wrote Maximum City, spending one and a half years writing the three-part, nine-hour thing. But six days prior to starting our prep, it got shelved and I was told it was not going to happen. The reaction to that was, I sat down, poured out everything I was feeling and what came out was the first draft of Kennedy.”
Speaking about how multiple projects getting stalled has affected him from within, the director said, “Inside, I have been dying for last four-five years. I wanted to make Maximum City, but I couldn’t. At the same time, two other scripts that I wrote, one in 2016 and the other in 2019-20, I am making both the films this year. While I have already finished one, the other is inching closer to completion. It’s almost like, I was finding my way back and Kennedy was that door through which I needed to step out. While finishing Kennedy, I did not know what to do next. I did not want to do another film that was forced on to me or that I was doing under some pressure.”
Earlier, in a conversation with Lallantop, Anurag had said that Netflix had backed out of Maximum City due to the controversy that happened with the political-thriller web-series Taandav. This led to some policy changes in streaming platforms and a decision to play it safe moving ahead.
