Anurag Kashyap on working with Radhika Apte in Lust Stories: 'I feel I can push her anywhere. She is very honest'

Mumbai: When four top directors of Bollywood came together to explore the theme of lust, they ended up choosing female protagonists and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who has directed one of the four stories in the anthology film, says the reason could be that men’s lust is “boring and typical”. Titled Lust Stories, the Netflix movie brings together four short films, helmed by filmmakers like Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar. [caption id=“attachment_4429131” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Anurag Kashyap. Image from Twitter.[/caption] All the films talk about female desire through several characters- a teacher-student relationship in Kashyap’s, the relationship between a maid and her employer in Zoya’s film, a woman’s extramarital affair in Dibakar’s and a newly-wed but unhappy wife in Johar’s short. “It was by chance that the protagonists are women. In our country, when you talk about lust, men’s lust gets so boring, it’s typical, it’s reduced to a sexual desire. We didn’t want to address it like that,” Kashyap told PTI. “In a country which has so much repressed sexuality, where a woman is not supposed to have lust, I think that’s why somewhere all of us chose a woman as the protagonist.” Kashyap’s short film opens the anthology and is about a married college professor, Radhika Apte, who enters into a sexual relationship with one of her students (played by Sairat fame Akash Thosar). While Apte’s character, Kalindi, wants to have “life experiences” and despises the thought of men getting clingy post an intimate encounter, she soon starts contradicting everything she says in the course of the 30-minute comedy short. Kashyap said he was inspired by his women friends for the story and developed it with Apte, who also shares the writing credit on the project. “There is some incredible trust that we have, I’ve done three shorts with her. The amount of trust she gives me, I get it from very few actors. I get it from Nawazuddin and Radhika. I feel I can push her anywhere. She is very honest. I throw things at her and she bounces it back.” In the film, Kashyap has used the fourth wall technique with the protagonist. “We went like that. I got her into a conversation and then shot it.” He praised Apte for being “comfortable with contradictions.” “A lot of actors judge themselves when they play something like that. They all want to come across as a good person. They never become real. It’s all about wanting to be the good one. “A man wants to be a Ram, a woman wants to be a Sita. Nobody wants to play it real with their contradictions, vulnerabilities, weaknesses. Radhika understands that.” The Mukkabaaz director said there was no script for the short. What one sees on screen is a result of “bouncing off ideas at each other.” “Even Akash trusted me, that if this is your process, I’ll become a part. Everybody wants characters to be defined with certainty, that this person knows what he/she is talking about. But here, we are like ’this person knows what she is talking about till she talks about it the next time.’ “She has so many versions, and all so self-serving and Radhika was comfortable doing that. We were laughing while doing it.” Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP, which made Love Per Square Foot for Netflix, has produced Lust Stories with Ashi Dua of Flying Unicorn Entertainment. The film will premiere on the streaming platform on 15 June.