Sit With Hitlist - Anurag Basu: Ranbir and I never fought on Jagga Jasoos. We never crossed the film's budget

Offering him a chance to graduate from directing on television to debuting in films producer Mukesh Bhatt asked Anurag Basu in the early 2000s how much he would charge Mukesh wellknown in Bollywood to be frugal with expenses suggested Rs 7 lakhBasu agreed so instantly to the number that taken aback and in that split sentence Bhatt revised that Rs 7 lakh into a twofilm deal In just two seconds huh Basu laughs But it was my stepping stone I was just an outsider getting to learn a lot I would have done it for free he says no complaints stillThis wouldve been for his forgotten debut Saaya 2003 starring John Abraham Tara Sharma Having delivered a boxoffice dud the sets for Basus second film had also been mounted when he had stopped showing up at the office of Vishesh Films run by brothers Mukesh and Mahesh Bhatt He told the producer hed lost confidence in the film they were about to shootstart in a few daysBut there was a halfconstructed set paid for while Vishesh Films were already reeling under a string of flops Ghuma phira ke Basu narrated an idea around what Mukesh had suggested Driving back home he found actor Kashmera Shah sitting at the Barista coffee shop in Lokhandwala He stopped to ask if shed dance for a song which Anu Malik composed in a couple of daysThey utilised that set for a track Dil ko hazaar baar roka and carried on with another film altogether Which was Murder 2004 It gave Basu tremendous boxoffice cred The film went on to collect R75 crore And Basu received R35 lakh second tranche of his twomovie deal making him perhaps the best directorial ROI for a producer in the history of Hindi filmsMale audiences across North India lined up to catch the skinfest Murder evidently inspired by Adrian Lynes Unfaithful 2002 mainly to ogle at Mallika Sherawat Its Emraan Hashmi the male lead who became the singlescreen sensation He became a rageEvery producer at the time top ones included had a DVD of a sleazy Hollywood film that they wanted Basu to convert into a Hindi movie Murder itself belonged to a Bmovie genre that subsequently became a franchiseHow Basu elevated it still is with a certain level of soft lighting and warm aesthetics Aesthetics are inbuilt you cannot change it Its the way you see things I used to also shoot television like that he saysIn fact you can notice even more of that surely the film industry did in Basus Gangster 2006 a musical drama loosely based on underworld don Abu Salem and his moll 90s starlet Monica Bedis escapades Who became the star from that movie Debutant Kangana RanautOf the 2025 girls we auditioned for the part her face just stuck in my head there was something unique about her Basu recalls Did he foresee her success In the beginning she needed guidance for everything But she is a really fast learner I have seen her growth during the filming of Gangster itselfWhat about her public persona as the relentless online troll if you may Did he see this coming Not really We usually dont meet but whenever we do this public persona is not the Kangana I know personally So I think there are two Kanganas Beech wali the other one I dont understandBasu 46 Bengali boy from Bhilai moved to Bombay to pursue a graduation degree in physics and look around for work in the entertainment industry alongside Lives of the young in the steel township he comes from are chiefly centred on cracking medical and engineering exams He got exposed to storytelling and performance arts because of the theatre group that his father ran as a hobby And theyd travel with plays at amateur theatre competitions across IndiaIn the sense of Bollywood Basu belongs to a productive class of the early 90s actorsfilmmakers from various parts of India looking to build a career in showbiz and who gradually took over Bollywoods reins laterEntertainment editor Mayank Shekhar connects with the filmmaker over a video callHe started out as a 22yearold assistant allowed to direct a scene in the popular television show Tara putting his foot down among veteran actors so they took him seriously which was becoming an issue He exited TV about a decade after as the highest paid director I used to make as much from a month of TV as I did from my first filmThere are also the common stories of doing producers rounds hanging around Prithvi in Juhu approaching Shyam Benegal Sriram Raghavan to assist Also accidentally dancing behind Mithun Chakraborty as the heros friend in a film called Dalaal 1993 because the director was Bengali Partho Ghosh and they were looking for a bilingual Bengali assistant to help communicate at an outdoor locationThere is a scene in Vikramaditya Motwanes film AK vs AK 2020 where the selfreferenced protagonist director Anurag Kashyap is casually referred to as Anurag Basu This is partly true in the reverse as well as it turns out since Basu would get messages meant for Kashyap back when there were pagers for communication or the lack of itIn fact they have a lot more in common I discover during this conversation including Benegal Raghavan Prithvi a play that both were meant to do for Makarand Deshpande And inevitably stories around the adorable old miser Mukesh BhattWhere similarities between Kashyap and Basu end is of course in their cinematic worldview Even a guntoting thriller with dames and dons Ludo 2020 in Basus hands turns into a joyously musical carnival of atrangicolourfulshiny characters His films are more fantastical in their approach yet experimental in their own right While it may not seem so he says they are actually drawn from realityThe semisilent musical Barfi he reveals is based on a reallife girl Razia played by Priyanka Chopra and who she actually met later and a boy with hearing impairment called Murtaza that was Ranbir KapoorBasu knew these two from a special school in Goregaon which had a branch near his Andheri office He had locked Barfis script the sleeper superhit of 2012 at the same time as hed finished writing Super 30 based on Bihari math wiz Anand Kumar that later got made with Hrithik Roshan directed by Vikas BahlLikewise the lead character played by Ranbir in the fullblast themepark adventure Jagga Jasoos 2017 of a young man who stammers but not when he sings is essentially Basus longtime music collaborator PritamKatrina Kaifs character in the same movie he says is wholly modelled on his clumsy wife Tani Calamity Jane thats her She could be holding a cup and be left with just the handle Lots of stuff that happens to Katrina in the film has actually happened before me in real life with TaniCalamity is also how Jagga Jasoos got blasted as by a wide section of the film industry upon release given how long it took to make it in the first place roughly over four years Yeah too long actually Basu admits We could have finished a year before There is not a single thing I can pinpoint for what went wrong Ranbir the lead was shooting and promoting four films Besharam Bombay Velvet Roy Ae Dil Hai Mushkil during this time I could have put my foot down and requested him not to But then Pritam also wanted time to make music I didnt know where to balance Even after all this time we were rushing with postproduction five months before releaseThen there was the story from Jagga Jasoos sets about veteran actor Govinda being hired hed even shot and then was fired Govindaji did come with us With such delays already with the shoot there was confusion if Govindaji is coming on the set or is he cancelling the flight or is he taking the fight or are we cancelling shoot It was so unpredictable I couldnt have taken that stress yaar We were shooting outdoor in South Africa everything was lined up I just had to let go of himNot that Basu isnt used to this level of stress more so a barrage of takedowns post the release of a film The biggest case study in his career might well be Kites 2010 a hugely ambitious transAtlantic release headlined by Hrithik Roshan with the Mexican telenovella star Barbara Mori in the female leadKites opened to theatres in India with desis wondering what language the film they had walked into was in English Spanish or Hindi The budgets clearly didnt match the public response to this immensely stylised romantic thrillerBasu himself felt as lost during the making of Kites he remembers as the audiences did after its release Take a film like Gangster I wanted to shoot in Korea I asked my producer Mukesh Bhatt if I could Hed be like Heres R3 crore finish the film within it Now I dont care if you go to Honolulu or anywhere else So I knew my budget production was in my hands Thats what I was used to With Kites it wasnt like that I was just going there and directing And we would discuss how we are going to execute the scenes I was not thinking of market returnshellip It started out as a small indie film It was taking its shape with four or five people making decisions Also my vision and producer Rakeshjis Roshan were separate Eventually yeh naa idhar ka raha naa udhar ka it belonged to neither an international nor a local audienceWhich isnt to tone down Basus own reputation mostly suggested warmly by his colleagues of him revelling in the chaos of filmmaking deriving magic from the spontaneity of a moment rather than overplanning While this may cause major heartburn if the money involved is massive it has surprisingly served him well in the mainstreamActors whove worked with him often speak about showing up on the set with little idea of what theyre meant to do The scene develops as they go along This can be a scary process yes It hasnt stopped him from attracting some of the top Bollywood stars around Case in point is Ludo 2020 with more bona fide movieindustry leads Rajkummar Rao Abhishek Bachchan Aditya Roy Kapur Pankaj Tripathi et al than you can fit into twoandhalf hours without each seeming like cameosI was not like this when doing television This process of mine started somewhere during the making of Gangster Kangana was new Shiney Ahuja used to come overprepared There used to be a struggle to get the performance right Too many retakes Also when I started wearing the hat of writer director and producer with Life In A Metro I didnt have to deliver a script to anyone The key reason for playing it by ear he believes is that actors dont usually get the full arc of a film Its better if they live in the momentAlso I dont commit to a scene till the last moment In Life In A Metro for example there is a scene where Kay Kay Menon and Shilpa Shetty confess about cheating on each other She talks about Shiney Ahuja I was staging the scene with Shilpa and an assistant whos also an actor And theres a dialogue that just slipped off the tongue Kay Kay asks Bachcha toh mera hai na Im the kids dad right That wasnt there in the script It appeared in the heat of the moment on the set I thrive on that actuallyWhich is also similar to how Basu winged it with Life In A Metro 2007 in the first place He had only written the script until interval point when he met then UTVs head honcho Ronnie Screwvala for a narration To adequately fill time and keep Screwvala and others sufficiently entertained he got composerfriend Pritam to tag along and play music all through the narration The script got sold while he was halfway into fleshing it outEverybody calls Basu Dada for elder brother in Bollywood As Bengali adults are affectionately named regardless of their age Director Basu Chatterjee was Basu Da even to millennials he died at 93 A wellknown Bengali trait with Basu is actually his penchant for the adda fun chat as I can sense while he generally eases into talking about his life with a gentlenesslightness of touch that often eludes the successfulselfawareAs a personartiste he finds himself connecting the most with the other great Bengali Kishore Da Kishore Kumar Every time I read about him I realise arre he thinks like me his madness his world it is fascinating Basu has been sitting on the draft of a Kishore Kumar biopic for years determined to make it It hasnt worked out yet It will be made by me promise very soon he saysLike Kishore Da Basu is also a polymath of sorts You can gauge that from his last movie the mad mad Ludo that dropped on Netflix in November He was the films cinematographer writer director producer along with playing the role of the traditional sutradhar narrator on screen This was one of the early movies to finish shoot while the pandemic was still on Surely they wouldve taken adequate precautions shooting the final scenes Although having sanitiser on set and shooting with a mask on isnt novel for BasuShortly after the success of Murder he was diagnosed with latestage cancer Doctors gave him a few weeks max It just happened too quickly One day I just saw my reflection and I didnt know this is what I was looking like the internal bleeding was happening buckets of blood going out I just wanted to breathe right until I went on the ventilator for 17 days It took a toll on my dad actually His health deteriorated after that It was tough on my familyThere is a scene in Life In A Metro where Nafisa Alis character dies in an ambulance in a traffic jam I thought this was going to happen to me when I was being shifted from Lilavati Hospital to Tata Memorial CentreThis was also the time Basu was in the midst of a film called Tumsa Nahin Dekha 2004 starring Hashmi Dia Mirza But the film as he says was all in his head And he was struggling for life Each day he would relay instructions recorded into a dictaphone from his hospital bed to keep the shoot goingThe treatment of course carried on for a couple of years I had become really thin had my mask on There were hospital bills to recover with treatment in the ICU that had gone on for really long There was a survival issue with regard to money I went to my old television colleagues at Zee and Sony and they gave me shows to do I had no film So it was back to square one I did television for over a yearHe got on a filmset finally with Gangster I also had Life In A Metro to make But decided that I may as well be with Vishesh Films at the point Producer Mukeshji used to carry a sanitiser in his bag yell at me if I wasnt being careful They were not greedy they were careful about my health They asked me to wait and I didnt want toA close brush with death one presumes changes man forever I ask Basu if he sees it that way a before and after as it were My rights and wrongs are the same But I have become less cynical about things Im more positiveOn an observable plane he concludes That is also when I decided to turn producer Life In A Metro happened because of that I thought when I make movies I should also make money It is important to keep money for your family