Anurag Kashyap

Anurag Kashyap (born 10 September 1972) is an Indian filmmaker and actor known for his works in Hindi cinema.

He is the recipient of several accolades, including four Filmfare Awards.

Kashyap was born on 10 September 1972 to a Rajput family in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.

His father Sri Prakash Singh is a retired Chief Engineer of the Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited and was posted in Obra Thermal Power Station in Sonbhadra district near Varanasi.

He did his grade sixth from Hillgrange School, Dehradun and, grade seven onwards, at the Scindia School in Gwalior.

Some of the locations used in Gangs of Wasseypur are also influenced from his own old house where he himself lived with his parents, sister, Anubhuti Kashyap, and brother, Abhinav Kashyap.

The day they met, Kashyap watched Taxi Driver (1976) at Nair's place, and the film inspired him to "write something".

The team of Sriram Raghavan, Sridhar Raghavan and Shiv Subramaniam were working on two projects, one of which was a short TV series, Auto Narayan, based on the life of serial killer Auto Shankar; the second one was a film scripted by Kashyap.

Auto Narayan got delayed because the script written by Subramaniam was not "working".

Kashyap rewrote the script and got credit for the same, but it was scrapped.

Owing to his desire to become a scientist, Kashyap went to Delhi for his higher studies and enrolled himself into a zoology course at the Hansraj College (University of Delhi); he graduated in 1993.

He then eventually joined the street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch; and did many street plays.

The same year, his couple of friends "urged [him] to catch a de Sica retrospective" at the International Film Festival of India.

In ten days, he saw 55 films at the festival, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves was the film that influenced him the most.

After the de Sica experience, Kashyap arrived in Mumbai in 1993 with INR 5,000 in his pocket.

Soon the money ran out, and he spent months on the streets, staying in lofts, "sleeping on beaches," "under a water tank and in the St Xavier's [college] boys hostel."

He then managed to find work at Prithvi Theatre, but his first play remained incomplete because the director died.

In 1995, an acquaintance introduced Kashyap to Shivam Nair.

In 1997, he wrote the screenplay of Hansal Mehta's first film, Jayate which failed to find a theatrical release; and episodes of the TV series Kabhie Kabhie (1997).

After writing a television serial, Kashyap got his major break as a co-writer in Ram Gopal Varma's crime drama Satya (1998) and made his directorial debut with Paanch, which never had a theatrical release due to censorship issues.

In 1998, actor Manoj Bajpayee suggested his name to Ram Gopal Varma to write a film.

Varma liked Kashyap's Auto Narayan and hired him, alongside Saurabh Shukla to write the script for his crime film, Satya (1998).

Satya was a critical and commercial success, and is regarded as one of the best films of Indian cinema.

He later collaborated with Varma in scripting Kaun (1999) and writing dialogues for Shool (1999).

In 1999, he made a short film, titled Last Train to Mahakali for television.

He then went on to direct Black Friday (2004), a film based on the namesake book by Hussain Zaidi about the 1993 Bombay bombings.

Its release was held up for two years by the District Board of Film Certification because of the pending verdict of the case at that time but was released in 2007 to widespread critical appreciation.

Kashyap's follow-up, No Smoking (2007) met with negative reviews and performed poorly at the box-office.

His next venture Dev.D (2009), a modern adaptation of Devdas was a critical and commercial success; followed by the socio-political drama Gulaal (2009), and the thriller That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011).

Abhinav is also a filmmaker, who made his directorial debut with the masala blockbuster, Dabangg (2010).

Anubhuti has been his assistant in most of his films.

She made her directorial debut with Doctor G (2022), a medical campus comedy, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Rakul Preet Singh, Shefali Shah and Sheeba Chaddha.

Kashyap's prominence increased with the two-part crime drama, Gangs of Wasseypur (2012).

For his contributions to film, the Government of France awarded him the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and letters) in 2013.

Kashyap subsequently co-produced the critically acclaimed drama The Lunchbox, and the biographical drama Shahid (both 2013), the former earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language nomination.

His next films were the anthology Bombay Talkies (2013), and the drama Ugly (2014).

In 2016, Kashyap directed Raman Raghav 2.0, a film inspired by the serial killer Raman Raghav.

His next film was the sports drama Mukkabaaz, which was released in 2018.

The same year, he co-directed India's first Netflix Original series, the crime thriller Sacred Games, based on Vikram Chandra's novel of the same name and the romantic drama Manmarziyaan.

He is also the co-founder of a film production company, Good Bad Films.