Anurag Kashyap seemingly refutes Abhay Deol’s claims about coming up with Dev D, narrates chain of events: ‘I hated the book so much’ | Bollywood News
From Abhay Deol accusing Anurag Kashyap of ‘glorifying’ toxic behaviour in Dev D to the filmmaker calling it ‘painfully difficult’ to work with Abhay—the actor-director duo has taken multiple potshots at each other over the years. In 2024, Abhay even claimed in an Instagram post that he was the one who pitched the idea of a ‘contemporary, musical version of Devdas’ to Anurag. Now, in a recent interaction, Anurag has given a detailed account of how Dev D came into exence, explaining that it was an adaptation of a script written Vikramaditya Motwane, who had assed Sanjay Leela Bhansali in his 2002 film Devdas.
Speaking at an event at Annapurna College of Film and Media in Hyderabad, Anurag shared that after his first two films—Paanch and Black Friday—were banned, he met a producer who asked him to make a love story. Recalling the conversation, Anurag said, “I told the producer, ‘I will give you a Devdas.’ But I hated that book so much. Motwane had worked on Devdas with Sanjay Leela Bhansali as an assant, so I told him, ‘You adapt Devdas, and I will adapt your script.’ I took his script and changed it completely, basing it on things that were happening at that time. The advantage of adapting a book that has been made so many times is that you don’t have to follow the beats. I was using the same beat to tell a new story.”
Anurag explained that since audiences were already familiar with the Devdas narrative, he didn’t feel the burden of setting up the characters’ backgrounds, which gave him the creative freedom to tell an offbeat story. “In the end, when the self-destruction of the character doesn’t happen, that surprises them,” he added.
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Talking about why he hates Devdas, he explained, “We are the only country who have written largest songs on self-pity and we celebrate self-pity. The idea was to take that and turn it around. ‘Emotional Atyachar’ was created as an antidote to self-pity song. We wanted to turn around the whole idea of self-pity.” During the interaction, he said that the germ of the idea was planted in his mind while watching a football match with Motwane and Abhay Deol, when one of them spoke about a stripper in the US named Chandramukhi.
In 2024, on the 15th anniversary of Dev D, Abhay Deol hinted on Instagram that he was the one who originally pitched the idea of the film to Anurag. He wrote, “It’s 15 years today since the release of Dev.D. I still remember pitching the idea of a contemporary, musical version of Devdas to Anurag, at the Juhu Marriott. The shock and excitement on his face is etched in my memory.”
Earlier, Anurag had accused Abhay of throwing tantrums on the set of Dev D and demanding a room in a five-star hotel. Speaking to HuffPost in 2020, he said, “He (Abhay) wanted to do artic movies but also wanted the mainstream benefits. The benefits and luxuries of being a ‘Deol’. He would stay in a five-star hotel while the entire crew stayed in Paharganj for a film that was made on a very tight budget.”
However, in a later interview with Mid-Day, Abhay refuted the claims and accused Anurag of spreading ‘a lot of lies’ about him, calling him ‘toxic’ and ‘a liar.’ He said, “So, one lie I’ll give you for example, that I demanded a hotel room. He actually came up to me and said, ‘Len, you can’t stay with us, you are a Deol so I’m going to put you up in a hotel room’. He literally told me that, I am saying this on camera. And what he told the press was, I demanded it,” he had said.
Abhay and Anurag never worked together after Dev D.
