Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur completes 10 years, as he gears up for the release of Dobaaraa

The iconic Gangs of Wasseypur completed 10 years. The Anurag Kashyap directorial was a huge success, garnering critical acclaim and mass appeal. Starring Manoj Bajpayee, the film featured Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Richa Chadha, Huma Qureshi, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi and Jaideep Ahlawat. The two-part intergenerational crime saga, set in Wasseypur, a small town near Dhanbad in Jharkhand, told the story of the coal mafia as it was passed down through three generations of a family entangled in crime, extortion, and murder.

Co-written by Kashyap and Zeishan Quadri, the first part of Gangs of Wasseypur came out on June 22, 2012. The second part hit cinema screens on August 8, 2012. The film’s soundtrack was composed by Sneha Khanwalkar and Piyush Mishra with lyrics penned by Mishra and Varun Grover.

Notably, Gangs of Wasseypur became the only Indian film to feature in The Guardian's list of 100 Best Films of the 21st century. Kashyap had written on Instagram, “This is that film of mine that destroyed my filmmaking life by the expectations it sets from me as a filmmaker and has been continuously so, and I have forever been trying to break away from it. Hopefully, someday that will happen.”

Meanwhile, Kashyap's next, Dobaaraa will be released on August 19. Produced by Ekta Kapoor’s Cult Movies, a new division under her Balaji Telefilms banner, marks the filmmaker-actor (Taapsee Pannu) duo’s third collaboration after Manmarziyaan and biographical drama, Saand Ki Aankh.

The director said he was looking forward to collaborating with Taapsee Pannu and giving the audience a fresh take on thrillers with Dobaaraa.

Pannu said she has enjoyed working on thrillers. "I've been quite fortunate in my career with the thriller genre, and I always look forward to pushing the envelope. This will be unique even more so because Anurag is directing it and Ekta is backing it," the actor added.

A remake of the Spanish-language mystery Mirage (2018), Dobaaraa was premiered at the London Indian Film Festival in June and will be showcased at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM) on August 12.

Kashyap recently stated in a press conference that he enjoys long-form storytelling. "I've been working on a lot of projects, but we're also dealing with a situation in which the type of drama that can be done is severely limited. We can't do anything remotely political or deal with religion right now. Despite the constraints, this is an excellent time to tell long-form and experimental stories."

This was his first time working on a remake, said Kashyap. "Fortunately, the film had not yet been released when we discovered the script. Taapsee contacted me because she was looking for a director. She was obsessed with this (project), and I was trying to find her directors, but we couldn't find anyone."

In response to the growing popularity of films from the south in the north, Pannu stated that the Hindi audience was "waking up to it because of this crossover," much of which can be attributed to OTT platforms. It's changed a lot for actors, she says, recalling how she was told to shed her "South Indian actress" image if she wanted to make it big in Hindi. "The films are still as good or bad as they were when they were made," she observed.