Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has recently been extremely emotional in talking about what he feels was a turning point in the career of Ranbir Kapoor: the failure of the collaboration between them, Bombay Velvet, in 2015. According to Kashyap, the commercial and critical failure of the film had a strong and enduring effect on Kapoor which made him become more conservative and less adventurous in his role decisions.
The experience left Kapoor in a self-doubt state and the director bemoaned that he now found himself retreating into commercial viability and conventional roles instead of taking a creative risk. This transition, as Kashyap opines, denied audiences the more round-skilled and adventurous performances that Kapoor was renowned with in his previous movies.
Anurag Burden of a Box-Office Bomb
The massive failure of Bombay Velvet was a decisive point of both Kashyap and Kapoor. The period crime drama is a film made on an enormous budget and one of the most awaited movies of the year. It had a dismal performance at the box office and this caused shockwaves in the industry. To Ranbir Kapoor who had been riding high on successful and acclaimed movies such as Barfi! and Rockstar, the failure most certainly came as a rude wakeup call.
This is evidenced by the honest confession of Anurag Kashyap, who was under pressure and the media attention on the success of the released film, and which could have caused Kapoor to become reluctant to take on non-heroic roles. As Kashyap perceives it, this was a self-doubt that resulted in Kapoor making a conscious choice to stick to a more conservative and predictable course in his cinematic career, concentrating more on crowd-pleasers instead of challenging his artistic limits.
Anurag Kashyap Missed Chances and Creative Pause
Kashyap reflection raises one of the most pressing questions of the cinema industry, enormous pressure on a movie star and his/her role in the way of commercial success, and sometimes at the cost of the art. In his view, the Bombay Velvet experience has placed a mental block on the head of Kapoor, which made him lose the courage to experiment. Before the movie, Kapoor had demonstrated a great variety of performances, playing a broad variety of characters with subtlety.
His filmography however started to have more mainstream entertainers after the year 2015. The remarks made by Kashyap imply a great regret that his project might in some way have led to this stagnation, and that one of the most promising actors of the country should have been deprived of the opportunities of exploiting his talents. This has created a debate on why a more forgiving atmosphere is needed where both filmmakers and actors can risk without risk of failure that will have them lose their careers.
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