How Anurag Kashyap became the new hype man of south Indian cinema

The chronicler of Uttar Pradesh’s akhara politics and the man who introduced most of us to Dhanbad’s coal mafia sprawl now lives a writerly life in the heart of Bengaluru’s Central Business District. You may spot him nibbling on Burmese small plates at cocktail bar Dali & Gala or catching the late-night show of a film at the PVR on Brigade Road. One autowallah he often encounters insists on giving him a ride, even when the Gangs of Wasseypur filmmaker says he prefers to walk. His Versova duplex days, with young Bollywood filmmakers, hungry writers, fans hanging on to their mentor’s every word, eagerly absorbing all he has to give, staying over, wanting more, are on pause for now. One friend described that house as a “throughfare”.

He says “Mumbai depresses me”; in Bengaluru he feels happy and is able to focus on his mental health.

These days Anurag Kashyap is praising Malayali filmmaker Chidambaram’s Balan: The Boy (2026) and urging anyone he meets to watch Pallaburusu (2026), a slice-of-life family-son Telugu comedy where a toothbrush takes on epic proportions. Not just the unofficial ambassador, today he’s also a prolific character actor and talent scout for the Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada industries—you could call him the new hype man of south Indian cinema.

The Versova nights have been replaced with a hangout featuring a new set of friends. Southern filmmakers send him their yet-to-be-released work and drop in to meet him. Kashyap, who moved to Bengaluru last year and has nurtured a cottage industry of indie filmmakers in Hindi cinema, is suddenly in their neighbourhood, accessible and happy to help. If he likes their films, he promotes them and connects them to regional filmmakers who will help market their movies.

He loves the geek quotient of the four film industries and how relatively untouched they are by censorship and propaganda today. “The editors in the south are mostly from YouTube. Their average age is 21 or 22,” he tells me when we meet at his airy apartment at a quiet cul de sac down the road from a Syrian Christian church. “Instead of narrating a script, directors [here] make the film in AI and show it to producers saying, ‘This is the film I want to make.’”

Apart from acting in half a dozen Malayalam, Telugu, and Tamil releases in recent years—playing a highly eccentric arms dealer with a penchant for pairing athleisure with gold chains (Rifle Club) or an investigating officer who is also an Ayyappa devotee (in Shaneil Deo’s Telugu debut Dacoit: A Love Story)—Kashyap is currently shooting or has recently wrapped up at least five more films. His first Kannada film, 8, where he plays a lead role, will be out soon. It’s different from the villainous psychopaths and policemen he usually plays. In the posters, he holds a football and stares pensively into the camera.

Kashyap doesn’t really enjoy acting. “My romance with southern cinema and acting is helping me in the sense that my financial stability comes from acting,” he shares. “I’m happy because it’s giving me space to write. I can spend time reading, I can spend time doing nothing.” The most important belongings he carried across cities are his book and movie collections, which are made up of titles that you are not likely to find on any streaming platform or Amazon. There are shelves devoted to Frank Capra’s filmography, rows filled with restored works by the Film Heritage Foundation and 4K DVDs featuring names like Fellini, Fassbender, Wong Kar-wai, and Yasujirō Ozu.

If he’s not celebrating his birthday surrounded by movies (he turns 54 today at the Venice International Film Festival) or watching films on the home cinema in his den, enveloped in the security blanket of his 15,000-plus DVD and Blu Ray collection neatly filed on the shelves around him, he’s writing prolifically. He may have left Mumbai, but he hasn’t left Hindi cinema. In Mumbai, the words dried up. Here, he can’t stop. “I’ve written or am in the process of writing films for Vikram [Vikramaditya] Motwane, Nikhil Mahajan, Sakshi Mehta, Akiv Ali, and Luv Ranjan, and some series for Anurag Goswami and for myself,” he says. “I’m just writing a lot.”
 

In Bengaluru, he’s moved on from the wreckage of Netflix pulling out of a long-gestating dream project, his adaptation of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. This was followed by Covid-19, no work, and depression. “My dealing with depression was drinking too much,” he says. Kashyap and his partners decided to shut down Phantom Films in 2018 during the #MeToo movement after sexual assault allegations against co-founder Vikas Bahl. “I realised I was also escaping the fall of Phantom. I did not grieve. So, the whole grieving happened during Covid,” he says. “I fell apart.”

Bandar (2025), Kashyap’s latest, problematic film on the unravelling of a man’s life after a false rape allegation, recently turned the spotlight on the movement again. He was drawn to this story despite knowing that there’s no comparison of rape statistics for men and women, and that data shows only a fraction of rape allegations against men are false. Kashyap said the criticism of the film was valid and that the released film wasn’t his final cut. (The producers have since filed a case against him for saying that.)

Feminist themes feature prominently in Kashyap’s brilliant two-part Nishaanchi (2025) a story of twin brothers and their mother (a hat tip to Salim-Javed films), yet he’s promoting Geetu Mohandas’s Toxic (he says it will “surprise” people), which has been slammed for its depiction of women as enablers of male brutality. This is classic conflicted Kashyap.

He draws on a conversation with friend and director Vetrimaaran, with whom he presented the 2025 gem Bad Girl. It barely drew female audiences despite being a thoughtful film about a young woman who rebels against societal conservatism. “Outrage sells more than empowerment. When people get outraged, they go to see for themselves,” he says. “It’s literally like an election. Buying a ticket is voting. Whatever film you vote for is the kind of film you’re going to get.”

These days filmgoers seem to be voting for propaganda. “A movie like Kerala Story 2 is a badly made film. It’s immature. It’s like giving a camera to a child who’s trying to make a film. But nothing matters because the film goes out and makes so much money. These are the conflicts in the head all the time. I’m living with these conflicts,” he says.

Kashyap’s unravelling and drinking in Covid and after took a toll on his relationship with long-time partner Shubhra Shetty, who increasingly began staying away from Mumbai. When graphic-novel-inspired Kennedy was premiering at Cannes in 2023, Shetty told Kashyap that she was staying put in Bengaluru and that he should move too. “She said, ‘I want the Anurag that I knew before,’” he says. If he wanted to make their relationship work, he would have to come to Bengaluru. “It took me time, but I came,” he says. Last year, he finally made the jump, rupturing his ties with a city that no longer felt right.

“I am trying to start from zero,” he says. This includes thinking differently for the Instagram age: How to make a hit for Gen Z while sidestepping Obsession? (His daughter Aaliyah, 25, watches anime, Obsession, and “I don’t know what else”.) How to write a Kashyap screenplay for a distracted generation without being literal and repetitive? How to make a film that works for them and himself?

“I don’t like to spoon-feed. Most of the OTTs are now saying to repeat the plot every 10 to 15 minutes. In Odyssey, the filmmaker explains everything,” he says of the Christopher Nolan movie that crossed $1 billion at the international box office. “Charlize Theron and Zendaya are tools to explain the story. They’re not acting; they’re listening to Matt Damon tell his story.”

Recently, someone shared a fun fact about filmmaking today: the average length of a film scene these days is two to three seconds. “Compare that to the average length of a shot in my last film at seven to nine seconds,” he says. “There’s a four-second lag.” How can he overcome this lag without compromising his style of filmmaking? “The world has changed and people want to watch films that move fast,” he says. “Content is becoming very high point to high point. You won’t see films like Deerhunter or Taxi Driver. Today, they would probably make The Godfather one hour shorter.”

Southern cinema, too, is borrowing from these global trends. “I have always loved Malayalam cinema, but recent Malayalam cinema is not really about Kerala. It is very inspired from international movies and adapted to Kerala. It’s not Kishkindha Kaandam (2024) or Bramayugam (2024) or even Lokah (2025), which was very rooted,” he says, naming three cult films released in recent times. “For example, I saw I, Nobody (2026). Great subject. I loved the film…till the common man started fighting 40 people inside a bus. And then you’re doing John Wick.”

Bengaluru is Kashyap’s creative lab where he can write without anger or resentment. It’s an insulated retreat with no constant pressure to “sell out”. A place where he meets likeminded “exiles” and “self-exiles” from all walks of life, not just cinema. “Everything is more real,” he says about his adopted city. It’s a safe space to revisit and tinker with his own films too. Nishaanchi would have fared better if he had used a voiceover to explain how local politics works in UP, like he did in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), people told Kashyap. “I’m experimenting with recutting the film for myself,” he says.

Mumbai is not the same anymore. “Even if I go for a day, it is very difficult,” he says. “I don’t want to meet anybody from the film industry.” He sees how most of his peers are toeing the politics of the day. “Survival has become an excuse for them to not be the filmmaker they were that I loved and respected,” he adds.

“The Hindi industry is very insecure,” he says about increasing government control of Hindi cinema. In the past few years, the Central Board of Film Certification has held the industry in a censorship chokehold, demanding cuts that target caste, religion and any critique of government. “Lots of people are pressured and lots of people are vulnerable, either to their fame or to their lifestyle or to family. And once under pressure, you let them in. And when they’re in, they don’t let go.”

He says he’s lost a lot of friends over this because his contemporaries perceive that he has left and is now judging them. “I’m not judging them at all. I just don’t want to be part of it. I’m happy they’ve found their way.”

A friend told him he was lucky that he could walk away and do things other than filmmaking, such as writing and acting. “Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. But filmmaking is my first love, which I’m not doing,” Kashyap adds.

At the end of the day, moving into the embrace of the gentler south is Kashyap’s survival strategy.