Anurag Kashyap on the Collapse of 'Maximum City': ‘In That Grieving, I Had A Heart Attack'

For over a decade, director Anurag Kashyap was working on what he hoped would be his magnum opus—Maximum City— until it was cancelled, seemingly out of the blue. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, Kashyap reveals how this loss shattered him, pushing him into a period of distress that resulted in his upcoming project, Kennedy.

Based on Suketu Mehta’s 2004 book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, the series had been in development since 2009. “I have been attached to Maximum City since 2009,” he says.

The project finally found a home at Netflix in 2019, but momentum stalled. “It was greenlit by Netflix. I told them, 'Please read the book'. Nobody except one person on the team read the book,” he shares. After the initial agreement, there came a prolonged stretch of uncertainty. He reveals that although the team found an issue within the first 15 pages of the book, there was no direct communication that the project would be shelved, and he continued to write for over a year. “There was silence for one-and-half years, and no one came and told me ‘it’s not happening.’ That was even more triggering.”

What was truly heartbreaking for Kashyap was the amount of labour he put into the project. “I handwrite,” he says simply, sharing that in total, he filled 900 pages completing the script.

“I was frustrated over Maximum City, because the amount of investment in that was so much,” he says, candidly.

The lack of closure affected him more than the eventual decision. When it did end, he shares that the conversation itself was straightforward. “I had a very simple, nice conversation with the head of Netflix India. She was very graceful, she understood the pain, and everything,” Kashyap shares, adding that they parted on good terms.

“I was grieving over it, which I did not know, until I went to therapy,” Kashyap says. “When you invest so much time [with something], it becomes your baby.”

He describes the loss rather bluntly: “It was a miscarriage.”

The grief of losing a project so close to his heart continued to rear its head, with severe impacts on his physical and mental well-being.

“In that grieving, I had a heart attack. I was on blood thinners, a vaccine reacted [badly], I got asthma, so I was on steroids.” The medication and health issues left him unsettled. “My mind was buzzing."

In the aftermath of it all, Kashyap reveals that he began drinking heavily to cope. “I started drinking, and ordering from Zomato all the time. My drinking got very bad.”

Kashyap eventually checked himself into rehab, with the support of his daughter. “I went to rehab, to fix myself—and I fixed myself.” However, around the same time, he injured his leg and was bedridden for months—surgery wasn’t an option, he says, because of the blood thinners.

Despite this, work slowly—and unexpectedly—re-entered his life. “Luckily, Zoya Akhtar called me. She said, ‘Will you play yourself in Made in Heaven?’,” he shares. Initially, he declined. “I said, ‘I’m lying in bed, my leg is gone, I’m in a wheelchair’,” to which Akhtar responded: “We’ll put the wheelchair in the scene.” 

“That’s how I came out of my room,” he smiles.

Soon after, Vishal Bhardwaj invited him to act in a short film. “Because of that, I started going out,” he says.

As he continued to gather momentum, Kashyap would have to face yet another “bomb”, he says, as his daughter moved out of his home to start a life with her partner.

“I was alone in the house, everyday, playing Tchaikovsky, drinking whiskey,” he laughs, describing his new daily routine. During this period, he shares, the blank sheets of paper he kept on his desk continued to beckon him. That’s when Kennedy was born, which helped him finally emerge from his grief.

“It took me time to come out of [mourning],” he shares. “I came out of it, writing Kennedy. That happened overnight," he says, adding that he wrote a 55-page script in one night, and sent it out to his friends seeking their feedback. Unlike the decade-long project that was Maximum City, Kennedy seemingly came out of nowhere. In Kashyap's own words: "I did not plan to write Kennedy."

Kennedy first premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, after which it was released digitally on Letterboxd Video Store on 10 December 2025. The film is now set to release on ZEE5 on 20 February 2026.

Watch the full conversation with the filmmaker-actor on The Hollywood Reporter India's YouTube channel, dropping later today