I prefer cinema to theatre any day: Anurag

The filmmaker may have produced the play The Skeleton Woman featuring his real-life partner Kalki Koechlin, but he maintains that he prefers cinema as a medium to express his emotions.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap may have produced the play The Skeleton Woman featuring his real-life partner Kalki Koechlin, but he maintains that he prefers cinema as a medium to express his emotions.

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"I prefer cinema any day to theatre. When I was acting on stage, I loved the stage. But now I would choose filmmaking," Kashyap, who was groomed on the capital's experimental stage, told IANS.

"The idea of creating something - showing off, reaching out to an audience, trying to find a voice on a platform that exists - somewhere deep down is a big therapy. All my films are let-outs - either of my anger or my points of view," he added.

Speaking about the play The Skeleton Woman, directed by Nayantara Kotian and written by Kalki, Kashyap said it was based on a Inuit folk tale about a woman and her husband, Women, Who run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

"Kalki and Prashant (Prakash) wrote it together. I had given her the story while she was auditioning for Dev D and it stayed in her head. And when Prashant and Kalki wrote it and won the Hindu-Metro playwright competition, I decided to produce it. The fact that we live together also helped," said Kashyap who is fond of experimental plays.

"I loved working for Samrangan and Sir Sir Sarla (starring Sonali Kulkarni) by Makrand Deshpande - both were experimental plays. Samrangam was all about physical acting," he said.

Kashyap, who released Dev D, a contemporary interpretation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's classic Devdas, starring Abhay Deol, Mahi Gill and Kalki, is working on two movies.

"I'm producing Udaan, a movie scripted by Vikramditya Motwani (the scriptwriter of Dev D). It is a story about a father and son, set in a small suburban town Jamshedpur. We will start pre-production shooting in July," he said.

For his second film Bombay Velvet, Kashyap has teamed up with John Abraham and Naseeruddin Shah.

Kashyap likes movies by Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Danny Boyle. However, his scripts are inspired by modern American playwright Edward Albee.

"I'm hundred percent influenced by Albee in my style of dialogues and filmmaking, though the irreverence of Harold Pinter creeps into my work at times," said Kashyap, who is known for his flair for words and written narratives.

The director, who studied Zoology at Hansraj College, is indebted to Delhi, the city which spurred him into showbiz.

"My old friend Suneet Kumar (of the Delhi-based theatre troupe, Actor Factor) introduced me to theatre and classical cinema in Delhi. I joined the Jan Natya Manch in 1992 and started writing my own experimental plays. Suneet preserved all my plays, some of which even I had forgotten - and later improvised on them," he said.

Kashyap loves acting on stage but not in films.

"I loved acting on the stage, but I don't like the idea of acting on screen. I don't have the patience to shoot on film sets. It is easy to get into the character on stage. So I keep writing movie scripts and doing other things for cinema," he said.

Kashyap plans to produce for three years before making something that is entirely his own.

He shot to fame with the screenplay of Ram Gopal Varma's Satya and followed it up with contemporary Bollywood classics like Black Friday, which he directed, and Water - for which he wrote the script.