Second Innings

With a new season of Sacred Games and a brand new production house, Anurag Kashyap is ready for another chapter in his long Bollywood career

- Nidhi Gupta

On a grey July morning, Anurag Kashyap is at Filmistan Studios in suburban Mumbai, dressed casually in a black V-neck tee and shorts, waiting for his shot to be ready. On the floors is the first film from his new production house (safely titled Good Bad Films), reportedly starring Malayali up-and-comer Roshan Mathew, and Saiyami Kher. “What’s Choked about? I call it a Sai Paranjpye thriller,” he grins. Does he want to elaborate? “No. I like to finish things before talking about them. People only understand what I’m trying to do after they’ve seen it.”

What Kashyap has just finished is shooting for the second season of Sacred Games, Netflix’s first India original series, which debuted to global acclaim just over a year ago. The platform greenlit the new season before the #MeToo controversy effectively split Phantom Films (after conducting its own investigation), but with a few role changes. Co-director Vikramaditya Motwane switched to showrunner; Neeraj Ghaywan (director of Masaan) was brought in to steer Sartaj Singh’s (Saif Ali Khan) arc; and Kashyap continued to direct Ganesh Gaitonde’s story (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) – arguably one of the most complex characters brought to screen.

“It feels like we’ve been doing Sacred Games forever,” Kashyap says. “It’s been such a long process, exhausting and exciting. It just keeps getting bigger.”

What is it about Gaitonde’s character that fascinates you the most?