Anurag Kashyap reveals YRF’s ‘biggest problem’ after Shamshera, Samrat Prithviraj flop: Aditya Chopra shouldn’t sit ‘in a cave’ and dictate to filmmakers

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap in a new interview attempted to dissect the string of flops released Yash Raj Films, and offered advice to the studio’s head honcho Aditya Chopra. Anurag admitted that there was a time when the entire industry would look at YRF and Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions for guidance on where the audience’s sensibilities lay, but that time has now passed.
With a series of flops this year — Jayeshbhai Jordaar, Samrat Prithviraj and Shamshera — YRF is having a particularly tough time in an already difficult phase for Bollywood. Anurag spoke to Galatta Plus about the state of the Hindi film industry, and why it is struggling.

“The industry is such that people will continue walking in from all walks of life,” he said, adding, “Here, cinema is largely controlled those people, and that to second generation, that has grown up in trial rooms. They have not lived life. So, they’re referencing is based on cinema. What is not on screen can’t be cinema to them. The biggest problem with YRF is the trial room effect. You take a story and you want to make a Pirates of the Caribbean out of it and it becomes Thugs of Hindostan. You take a story, and you want to make a Mad Max: Fury Road out of it, and it becomes Shamshera. The moment you head in that direction, you’re cheating yourself, especially in today’s time. The Shamshera would’ve really worked two-three years back.”
The filmmaker said that audiences are now exposed to all kinds of cinema, and will not fall for imitations of the real thing when they can watch the real thing themselves. Anurag said that he didn’t like Jayeshbhai Jordaar ‘at all’, because the Gujarat in the film ‘didn’t look like Gujarat’.
Read more: Anurag Kashyap: We are living in strange times where Sushant Singh Rajput trends everyday and everyone is boycotted
Offering further dissection of YRF’s model, Anurag continued, “You have one person sitting in a cave, who doesn’t know the world outside, dictating how everybody should be making their films and telling them what to do. Obviously you’re digging your own grave… You have to empower people, you can’t dictate terms. That time is passe now. If Aditya Chopra has hired a bunch of people, he needs to empower them and not dictate them, not control the casting, not control everything. Sit in your office, hire good people if you trust them, and let them make their film. Which is the make he makes. He doesn’t let them (be).”
Anurag said that not just YRF, other studios also need to pay attention to this, because now, everybody is trying to copy the Marvel model and create their own shared universes. He said that this will result in filmmakers ‘losing themselves’. Anurag himself has a film coming out in theatres on August 19 — the science-fiction thriller Dobaaraa, starring Taapsee Pannu in the lead role.