On January 19, 2012, Anurag Kashyap got a call from Amitabh Bachchan. It was three days after the filmmaker had shot for Bombay Talkies with him. “He said, ‘We’re trying to do TV and do something new’. I told him that if I was coming on board, things would have to happen a certain way. He said: ‘I am producing it with Endemol and I guarantee you it will happen’,” recalls Anurag, creative director of Yudh , the new TV series starring Amitabh Bachchan that will premiere on July 14 and air four times a week for five weeks.
The 20-episode series is a suspense drama-thriller about a dying man, his family, his inheritance, insecurities and adversaries. “We’ve been working on it for over one-and-a-half years. I did it along with Bombay Velvet , during schedule breaks.” The series director is Ribhu Dasgupta, who directed the still unreleased Michael for Kashyap. Since Bachchan needed a more experienced hand on the set for the young filmmaker to consult, Anurag and Shoojit Sircar took turns to be there for the shoot and supervise production. “I said that we would write all the episodes before going on the floors. We won’t shoot till the scripts for all episodes are done and we won’t edit till all episodes are shot. So it was shot like a 20-hour film broken into schedules. I was there for the first two weeks of the shoot to set the mood and the pattern of the show and how real we were going to be,” explains Kashyap.
“On the first day of shoot, I told Amitabh, ‘sir, we need a different approach. It’s not a performance of a mega star’. And he became a different person. So real that it is unbelievable how deglamourised he looks. Not just the performance but also how fragile and old he looks onscreen. Amitabh Bachchan has reinvented himself. His performance is something else. If he decides to get real, he can be more realistic than some of the best actors out there.”
The show also features Sarika, Kay Kay Menon, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Zakir Hussain, Ayesha Raza, Aahana Kumra, Pavail Gulati and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a crucial role.
As the showrunner, is he the Series Creator then? “No, the series creator is often the writer and I believe that’s how it should be. Bijesh Jayarajan is the writer of the show. He would bounce it off me. My real function was casting, editing, locking episodes, design, perspective, and supervision every night,” says Kashyap.
It’s a long-realised dream for Kashyap to do a mini-series for TV. “ Black Friday was written like a six-part TV series. Aaj Tak backed out at that time, so it became a film. Aditya Bhattacharya was supposed to direct the TV series and he gracefully said, ‘You attempt it’. I was only hired as a writer first.”
