Director Anurag Kashyap has opened up about the budget and the revenue of films. Talking about how a film’s budget is spent on “paraphernalia”, Anurag Kashyap told Humans of Cinema, “They are not spending the money on the film. People need to come back to this whole reality check. One thing people need to understand is that when we make a film, we’re working, we’re creating something. It’s not a holiday, it’s not a picnic. A lot of money that is spent doesn’t go into making the film. It goes into the paraphernalia; it goes into the entourage. You’re shooting in the middle of a jungle, but one car will be sent to the city three hours away specifically to get you that five-star burger you want. You don’t get into the process of it.”
Anurag Kashyap also said that independent ideas are not getting the backing. He added, “In the mainstream, independent ideas work much more. But the thing is they don’t get the backing. Today you go to any actor, any star. They want to make sure whether it (the project) is a big project or not, whether it will be hit or not, whether it will make business or not. They think that ‘the script is good but what can we do so that it earns more’. If the script is good, they must do it. Everybody starts thinking of what will happen after the film comes out. But nobody is going by instinct. We all are very caught up in this. And social media is the biggest culprit in that.”
The Gangs of Wasseypur director continued, “The film’s business has taken over everyone. Everybody is talking about the box office numbers. And in a time like today when people are actually making much more money than they would have 20 years ago they feel short-changed. When I was working as a writer, my fees for the entire film were less than what a first AD would get per month today. But I cannot make a film today like I made Gulaal, Raman Raghav 2.0 and Ugly. It is because of politics as well as budgeting.”
Anurag Kashyap also shared an instance from his 2018 series Sacred Games. He said, “I cannot budget the film at that cost, today, because when OTTs came in a lot of things got spoiled. For example, I had never seen so many vanity vans on my set as I had seen on Sacred Games. That’s how the culture got started. Then you can’t reverse that. Finally, those people started getting paid who were totally ignored, which is the technical crew, who work the longest on a film. They come in first, they leave last. The actor comes, shoots and goes. But people who were least paid started getting paid, in a kind of fair way. But a lot of extra things started coming in.”
He said, “Now you cannot go from there. The reversing will cause a lot of gaps now. It will take a lot of time. Actors have to revise their prices. Now, OTTs have also realised this. Everyone wants to cut down costs now. What has happened is, initially everyone raised the cost, but now they want to cut it down.”
