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Every once in a while, there comes a film or an OTT show that stirs up a lot of controversy. Ali Abbas Zafar’s ‘Tandav,’ starring Saif Ali Khan, became a huge talking point, post which a lot of films were either shelved or directors had to change the scripts to avoid facing similar kinds of backlash that Zafar’s show faced. One of the films that got shelved around the same time was Anurag Kashyap’s film, which was supposed to be based on Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. The director has now opened up about what it felt like when Netflix backed out of the project.

While talking to The Hollywood Reporter India, Anurag mentioned that he had urged Netflix’s team to go through Suketu Mehta’s book. However, the director revealed that only one of them eventually read it.

Anurag said, “It was greenlit by Netflix. I told them, ‘Please read the book. Nobody except one person on the team read the book… There was silence for one and a half years, and no one came and told me, ‘it’s not happening.’ That was even more triggering.”

Kashyap was unable to grasp the feeling of grieving over the film being shelved till the time he went into therapy. The director had handwritten 900 pages of the script, and for the film to get shelved, it had an impact on his health, too.

Talking about the film, he said, “When you invest so much time, it becomes your baby.” He further went on to describe it as “a miscarriage.”

Anurag revealed, “In that grieving, I had a heart attack. I was on blood thinners, a vaccine reacted, I got asthma, so I was on steroids… My mind was buzzing… I started drinking and ordering from Zomato all the time. My drinking got very bad.” Eventually, he admitted himself to a rehab.

It was only after this incident that Anurag received a call from Zoya Akhtar to star as himself in the second and final season of Made In Heaven. Even though Kashyap had told Zoya about being in a wheelchair, she had insisted that he be a part of it and had also told him that she would incorporate the wheelchair into the scene.