Anurag Kashyap decodes his unique style of direction, explains how he shot the police station scene in Ugly: ‘I fell on the floor laughing’

The actors and technicians who work with Anurag Kashyap often speak about how the director throws them into the deep end and changes things at the last moment just so he can get the best out of his actors. In a recent interview with IMDb India, Anurag discussed one of the scenes from his film Ugly where Rahul Bhat’s character had to report his daughter being missing at the police station and how he decided to brief the three actors differently for the said scene. The scene also had Girish Kulkarni and Vineet Kumar Singh.
Anurag explained that he realised that both Rahul and Vineet were over prepared for the scene so he decided to throw them a curveball. He gave the three actors different brief that helped enhance the scene that eventually went on for 14 minutes.
The Gangs of Wasseypur director said, “Initially that sequence was a three page scene on paper. And it was the first day of shooting. And this was the first time I was working with Girish Kulkarni and Rahul Bhatt. When we went into the scene, Rahul was over prepared and Vineet being very sincere was also over prepared. Girish was the only one who had read the script. Because he was a writer, I had shared the script. But with Vinit and Rahul, I had not shared the script with them. They did not know what film I was making so there was this constant thing of being the best and better than the other one so I got an idea from when we were rehearsing the scene. I gave different instructions to different actors.”

Anurag explained that with Rahul, he said, “I told Rahul that you have just lost your child.” He went on to tell him that he will try to describe everything that he witnessed and how things progressed. He added, “You are harrowed. You can’t understand why nobody wants to believe you.” With Vineet, he took a different approach. “I told Vineet you are a street smart guy.” He was also given the brief that he should look down upon Rahul and assume he is “stupid.” He added, “So every time, Rahul is trying to explain, you cut him off and try to the smart one trying to deal with the cops the way you know best.” And with Girish, he just told him to not believe either of them. In the end, he started rolling the scene with saying, “Lets see how the scene goes. ”
He further said, “We just went into the scene. And when we went into the scene. Everybody followed the separate brief that was given to them and they had not talked to each other. That scene was 14 mins. It could have gone for longer. But I was laughing so hard. I fell on the floor laughing.”
They did the scene from a few other angles as well but Anurag said that the original take of 14 minutes is probably the funniest thing that came out of this experiment.