Anurag Kashyap says he made Nishaanchi to undo Gangs of Wasseypur in an IMDb exclusive

Nishaanchi, the highly anticipated crime drama, makes its way to theatres this weekend. The film marks the debut of Aaishvary Thackeray with Anurag Kashyap directing him. Kashyap spoke exclusively with IMDb, where he shared why he made Nishaanchi, why it took the film a decade to release, and why he chose a newcomer to lead the film.

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Speaking about why the film took a decade to complete, Kashyap said, “The right time to look at the project is when everything falls together. The cast, the producer, the studios, everything fell together now, that’s why it is the right time. It was very difficult to cast for the longest time. There’s not a single studio or actor that I have not been to. All of them wanted to do the film but they had this issue or that issue, and I did not want to change one thing in my script, they just somehow didn’t work out. With newcomers, it took a lot of time to find the correct studio. I met an Amazon executive on a flight to Melbourne, it was a long flight and they had no chance to escape me. By the time the flight landed, they had greenlit the project.”

Kashyap mentioned, “Nishaanchi for me is a throwback to all the Hindi cinema that I have loved growing up. Like until the 80s, 70s, 60s, from all the Dilip Kumar films to the Amitabh Bachchan films, to Mother India, Mughal-E-Azam, Naya Daur, Bimal Roy’s movies, and that was everything.”

On comparisons to his film Gangs of Wasseypur, he said, “I made Nishaanchi to undo Gangs of Wasseypur. The two films are as different from each other as distant Wasseypur is from Kanpur, like 800km. Secondly, after Wasseypur, everyone thinks that I invented swear words, they didn’t think that swear words existed before Wasseypur, I had to undo that also. I am exhausted of people asking me for Gangs of Wasseypur 3, which is the easter egg that my producer put in the teaser that we’ll make our gang - Babloo Nishaanchi, Rangeeli Rinku, and Dabloo, this isn’t the gang from Wasseypur, and then the line comes - Mien dungah jawab, mien hu Raja Hindustan ( I’ll give the answer, I am Raja Hindustani).”

Revealing what impressed him the most about Thackeray, Kashyap shared, “He’s a phenomenal talent. He’s an actor, music composer, lyricist, singer, he is so many things. He’s sung two songs in the film, he’s composed a song, he’s composed some tunes in the film. He’s phenomenal in the sense that if I don’t tell you he is Aaishvary Thackeray, you will think he’s a boy from Kanpur. There is a sequence when the two brothers confront each other and, for the first time, Aaishvary from Babloo becomes Dabloo. Our jaws fell, because his body language changed, his demeanor changed, his looks changed. We were so used to seeing him with long hair and long beard, suddenly it was like a new person came out of it and that first walk in is something that I will not forget.”

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