Anurag Kashyap's Kennedy inspiration also includes Mumbai landmark Antilia; details inside

The filmmaker divulges a few interesting details from the glitter and glamour of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival

Anurag Kashyap on the uncanny Antilia inspiration behind 'Kennedy'

For Anurag Kashyap, returning to Cannes with his latest labour of love Kennedy has evidently been a cathartic experience. The emphatic 8-minute standing ovation that the screening received at the majestic 'Auditorium Louis Lumière' could be the validation that he needed to be prompted back into his maverick form, though one might claim that he was never out of it.

"This is my first film at theatre lumiere. It's 2500 people, which is more people than the entire audience that saw my previous film Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat," he says in a recent interview in Cannes, bearing his trademark grin on his face.

But there is no doubt that Kashyap feels more secure as a filmmaker than ever and that each film of his, both in the recent past and the ones that are yet to arrive, is a form of a meditative reaction to what's happening around. Unlike the angst and feverish zest he had before, he says that he is a far more 'secure' filmmaker today. And perhaps that is why, the idea of Kennedy struck him from out of nowhere.

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"It [the film] is very personal because it's all me. It's (like) everything that I reacted to. It's personal in terms of my own equations and relationships - it's like my view of the world and the moment we are living in. I didn't think of the plot, it just came to me," he says in the same interview.

But was there any isolated incident that inspired him to conceive Kennedy? Kennedy is about a brooding ex-Mumbai cop who, though being presumed dead, rises from the trenches and continues to work in the corrupt system. So, what about the world around him inspired Anurag Kashyap to make the film? The answer is quite fascinating.

"What inspired me was that one stray incident of a Scorpio being found outside Antilia (the Ambani home on Carmichael Road, Mumbai) with explosives. Though the film is not based on that, the incident triggered the story and everything else in the film is fictional," adds Kashyap. In the same vein, he shares that the character of Kennedy was developed through multiple sources, including the many stories that he has heard from Sudhir Mishra.

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