<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/mar/Mayank-Shekhar-new_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="76" />Shortly after <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/dhurandhar-2-box-office-ranveer-singh-spy-thriller-crosses-rs-850-crore-23622310" rel="nofollow">Dhurandhar&rsquo;s </a>success, star-director Aditya Dhar told Ram Gopal Varma (Ramu) that he&rsquo;d essentially made &ldquo;Satya, Company, and added patriotism!&rdquo; Ramu told me this.
Anurag Kashyap, likewise, tells me he often wonders aloud to blockbuster filmmakers, when they admit to having been inspired by him: &ldquo;What did you see in my films to [churn out] Rs 600-800 crore [hits]?&rdquo;&nbsp;
To be fair, directors of Malayalam minimalism express the same sentiment to Kashyap (Black Friday, Gangs of Wasseypur, DevD).&nbsp;
Among Ramu&rsquo;s biggest bhakts, publicly voicing impact of his cinema they grew up on, are the likes of Prashanth Neel (KGF), Sandeep Vanga Reddy (Animal).&nbsp;
Besides that they&rsquo;ve been such influential, working writer-director-producers, over multiple decades &mdash; what&rsquo;s common to Ramu, 63, and<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/adivi-sesh-anurag-kashyap-is-indias-best-hindi-dialogue-writer-23622141" rel="nofollow"> Kashyap</a>, 53?&nbsp;
Firstly, Satya (1998), which the latter, as co-writer, debuted in movies with; and that the former, rightly believes, is still his &ldquo;most perfect&rdquo; work as director.&nbsp;
Also, both are mainstream auteurs. For, what&rsquo;s any great popular cinema, if not inevitably meeting mid-way, between self-expression, and certain public expectations from the medium itself.&nbsp;
They&rsquo;ve widely resonated with realism (in characters, storyline), for believability &mdash; in a manner that even Star Wars is realistic. It&rsquo;s what Dhar does with Dhurandhar, too; only amping up scale/style to altogether another level.
To a lesser extent, of course, Ramu believes he probably achieved the same effect with Satya &mdash; by raising mass-appeal of a grimy, gritty underworld/crime thriller from, say, Govind Nihalani&rsquo;s Ardh Satya (1983). At any rate, Nihalani told him so.&nbsp;
Ramu recalls, after a screening of Satya, top producer Boney Kapoor sighed to writer Javed Akhtar about how somebody from outside Bombay could make such a film. Akhtar retorted, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s exactly why he could!&rdquo;
Kashyap theatrically debuted as director with Black Friday (2004), set in 1993 Bombay blasts. To compare, barring exceptions, he&rsquo;s decidedly more left (artsy, experimental) than right (crowd-pleasing, commerce).&nbsp;
In 2012-13, as filmmaker (producer/director), Kashyap had seven films simultaneously selected at Cannes. It&rsquo;s unlikely Ramu has ever submitted films at a festival; let alone, cared to attend one!&nbsp;
As Ramu repeatedly prompts his audience, he got into the movies, swayed by &ldquo;<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/entertainment/bollywood-news/article/amitabh-bachchan-calls-his-house-jalsa-the-blessings-of-millions-23618949" rel="nofollow">Amitabh Bachchan&rsquo;s</a> guns, and Zeenat Aman&rsquo;s thighs!&rdquo;&nbsp;
You can sense superstar Bachchan, throughout his debut, Shiva (1990), with Nagarjuna as &lsquo;angry young man&rsquo;; even a hat-tip to the iconic, police-station scene from Zanjeer (1973). Kashyap&rsquo;s first film, Paanch, was also about an angry young man (Kay Kay Menon). It never released.&nbsp;
Ramu first met Bachchan at a preview of Shiva. Ever since, he would&rsquo;ve singularly collaborated with Bachchan, the most number of times in his acting career &mdash; nine, once he eventually directs the greenlit Sarkar 4.&nbsp;
Not Manmohan Desai (eight), Hrishikesh Mukherjee (eight), Prakash Mehra (seven)&hellip; It&rsquo;s Ramu! Bachchan, recently, reminded him of it.&nbsp;
Survey online comments on anything to do with a Kashyap film, lately, it&rsquo;s inevitably full of randos ranting, &ldquo;He&rsquo;s going the Ramu way!&rdquo;&nbsp;
What does that even mean, I ask Kashyap. He says, &ldquo;That I&rsquo;ve made my [Ram Gopal Varma Ki] Aag!&rdquo; Which was, perhaps, Bombay Velvet (2015); commercially, flop, of a different kind, still.&nbsp;
I guess, you can tell, how separate Kashyap and Ramu are, from their responses to the ongoing onslaught of AI in<a href="https://www.mid-day.com/mumbai/mumbai-news/photo/in-photos-huge-crowds-gather-to-see-amitabh-bachchan-greet-fans-at-his-house-jalsa-in-mumbais-juhu-105398/2" rel="nofollow"> filmmaking.&nbsp;</a>
Kashyap&rsquo;s clear: He&rsquo;d rather be rendered irrelevant than submit to its artistic fakery. Ramu can&rsquo;s stop singing praises, to anyone willing to listen, about this Chinese video-generating sensation called See Dance!
What unites them, chiefly, is how, as rank outsiders, they built a mini film industry/ecosystem around themselves, for such a long while in Mumbai, turning into messianic mid-cap producers of the movie trade.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s hard to list the sheer number of completely untested talents (directors, actors, technicians, musicians), and films, they backed on creative conviction alone.&nbsp;
Kashyap feels the one thing he&rsquo;d tell his 20-year-old self is never to produce films: He lacks the financial acumen. Ramu bears no such grudge. I&rsquo;m sure, though, that Kashyap could gracefully pontificate, forever, on first films by his &lsquo;finds&rsquo;, for lack of a better word: Vikramaditya Motwane&rsquo;s Udaan (2010), Bejoy Nambiar&rsquo;s Shaitan (2011), Neeraj Ghaywan&rsquo;s Masaan (2015)&hellip; Or the movies that many made later.
With friends and camera at my favourite bar, WTF (Versova), I ask Ramu to list me the same for his prot&eacute;g&eacute;s. He says, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like this: I could&rsquo;ve given Shimit Amin (Ab Tak Chhappan) to make Gayab (directed by Prawal Raman), instead. The films would be the same!&rdquo; Some of Ramu&rsquo;s cool-quotient emerges from precisely this.&nbsp;
He reminisces (because I prod him to), &ldquo;Prawal Raman was an interior decorator; E Niwas (Shool) was my office boy; I met Sriram Raghavan, when he was with Trade Guide (box-office journal); cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi (Company) was fourth camera-operator in a TV show&hellip;.&rdquo;
I first met Ramu, in my early 20s, over a story, for my newspaper. On way back, I nearly flipped, in my train, with a text from Ramu: &ldquo;If you ever get fed up of journalism, you know where to come&hellip;&rdquo; Evidently, never quite got fed up of journalism! Ah, well.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.

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