Black Friday to release finally!

Saumit Singh
Tuesday, January 02, 2007


For filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, February 9 promises to be one of the best Fridays of his life. With the Supreme Court finally clearing the deck for the release of his film Black Friday, that’s the day it will be hitting the screens.

“It’s been a nerve-wracking time for me but now things are looking good,” says an upbeat Kashyap, who is currently shooting for ‘No Smoking’ with John Abraham and Ayesha Takia.

Real on reel

It’s a rare case of reel imitating real. While the film was made even as the trial for the Mumbai blasts (1993) case was still going on, there’s almost no material change in what the film says and what facts emerged later.

Kashyap’s film traces the sequence of events from three days before the blasts till when the police cracked the case.

“In retrospect, everything has turned out to be just the way we showed it in the film,” he says.


Dark and daring

Anurag’s penchant for dark cinema is now well known, but the filmmaker insists that it’s the style he’s most comfortable with.

His first film Paanch had run into trouble with the Censor Board in 2000, who felt that the film wasn’t ‘healthy entertainment’.

Constructed around the infamous Joshi Abhyankar murder in Pune, it dealt with the subject of sex, drugs and misguided youth and drew heavily from his own experiences.

“I make the type of films I know how to make. I am not as skillful as the rest of the people making Bollywood films,” he says.

Clearly, not even the grief Black Friday and Paanch have given him will straitjacket him into making more ‘commercial’ cinema.

Smoke and smiles

But if his latest venture is any indication, he is learning to loosen up a bit. A funny, Kafkaesque thriller, No Smoking is about a chain smoker who gets into a rehab programme to save his marriage.

“It’s not typical Bollywood, but yes it’s different.”

s_saumit@dnaindia.net