Bombay Velvet a nostalgia trip to 60s

What is the history of Bombay? Why don't we see the real city in our old movies?" were the questions that troubled Anurag Kashyap and inspired ‘Bombay Velvet’, a cinematic rewind to the swinging sixties. "I wanted to create the nostalgia, the era. There is a whole history behind how the city was made. You find that world online but don't see in our old movies," said Anurag.

"The land scams today have their root in Bombay of that era. There was smuggling of gold and silk and the city had a great tabloid culture. British hangover was still there, alcohol was banned, there was bootlegging. How many know that Mohammad Rafi was a great jazz singer in Konkani?"

Set against this backdrop of glamour, crime and deceit, the film is a passionate love story, starring Ranbir Kapoor as an ambitious street fighter and Anushka Sharma as a jazz singer.

Director Karan Johar plays the main antagonist, a media mogul Kaizad Khambata. Anurag says the film, particularly Anushka's character, is a tribute to Lorna Cordeiro, a jazz singer, who ruled the night clubs with her silky voice in the '60s. "This film is dedicated to her. There were places like Bistro and La Bella, whose interior helped us model the club shown in our movie.

There were opium dens, nighclubs frequented by navy people in Colaba. Bombay was very metropolitan at that time because it was a port city." Anurag, who shot to fame with his small-budget, gritty dramas without stars, encountered many naysayers in his nine-year-old journey of making this movie. They believed he was overreaching with the big-budget saga.

"Not so," says Anurag, who is confident that the movie (which has cost more than Rs 80 crores) needed that kind of budget. "It was my most challenging film creatively. It is the tale of a city which we had to recreate. We had to show the BMC, Marine Drive of that era. We needed that scale, logistics and special effects."