‘Was depressed, had two heart attacks trying to make 'Maximum City': Anurag Kashyap

Anurag Kashyap is one of the most sought-after filmmakers in Bollywood. Be it newcomers or established actors, everyone wants to work with him. The filmmaker has delivered several commercially and critically successful projects over the years.

After the success of Sacred Games, the filmmaker was working on the adaptation of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City for Netflix. However, several streaming platforms dropped a number of projects after Ali Abbas Zafar’s Tandav caused massive controversy in India and Kashyap’s Maximum City was one of them.

In a recent conversation with the Washington Post, the filmmaker revealed that he slipped into depression, drank heavily, and had two heart attacks after Netflix walked out of Maximum City.

"It was my best work. I've never done such honest, important work. Why greenlight it, then change your mind? It's invisible censorship,” he said.

The filmmaker added, "Maximum City was where all my energy went. I was heartbroken. I totally lost it.”

He opened up about how he had believed that streaming would be a space where he would hone his art but those dreams were promptly quashed.

“Streaming was finally the space I was waiting for. The disappointment is it was supposed to be a revolution, but it was not. Like social media, it was supposed to empower people, but it became a tool,” he added.

Maximum City is a non-fiction novel that depicts four perspectives on how people live in Mumbai. The book is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

On the work front, Anurag Kashyap last directed the thriller Kennedy, which starred Rahul Bhat and Sunny Leone in lead roles.

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