Dapper in a black suit and black glare, Anurag Kashyap walks into the Film Bazaar's NFDC Knowledge Series in Goa on Monday afternoon and announces straight-faced, “I was at a friend's wedding and partied all night. So now you have to live with my red eyes.“ He was obviously referring to Madhu Mantena and Masaba Gupta's reception at which he was spotted clicking selfies with his co-producers, Madhu and Vikas Bahl.

Buzz is the four-member team which also includes Vikramaditya Motwane, also referred to as the 'Fuh Se Phantom' creators, is headed for a split? “Utter rubbish. We live together, party together and are thick as thieves. We are waiting for something different. Why doesn't everybody wait and watch instead of spreading negative reports about the production house. Trust me, the four of us are going to die together,“ guffaws the 43-year-old filmmaker.

Shifting gears to what he refers to as “the biggest loss making film in the history of cinema“, this year's summer-release Bombay Velvet, featuring Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma, Anurag is at ease as he points out where he went wrong. “When you let people buy into your idea and dream, you also have to take on their pressure. My own partner told me that I had made a Rs 90-crore art film and a lot of people had issues with that,“ he reveals, adding that he has to live with the burden of losing all that money for the rest of his life. “That gives me nightmares.“

Interestingly, his filmmaker friend, Bardroy Barretto, who spent 10 years making a Goan film out of the same source material as Bombay Velvet has no regrets. Nachoaea Kumpasar, which is also set in the '50s and focuses on a star-crossed romance between a jazz trumpeter and a singer released just before Anurag's ambitious project. His debut film is still running in theatres in Goa and has made a healthy profit. “He took two years to release it because he sold it territory wise and is now making profits from it. He stuck to Lorna Cordeiro and Chris Perry's story while I manipulated it. He made an honest version and a powerful film. But we planned way too many things with our film and it was a disaster,“ he sighs.

Meanwhile, the filmmaker wrapped his next, Raman Raghav 2.0, a thriller based on the life of a serial killer by the same name, featuring Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead and Vicky Kaushal as the cop. “I've already started writing the next script and will finish it this year. But I will not say anything ever again, I have learnt my lesson. Money is the biggest nightmare and I'm not going to make a massive budget film again. I'm not going to waste my dream like that, I will only make films on a controlled budget now,“ he asserts, sounding like a wounded soldier. He admits he is a complete control freak and will be writing, directing, producing all his films himself, in association with a studio, but never again on such a grand scale. “I bought my own DVDs of Paanch (his unreleased film starring Kay Kay Menon and Tejaswini Kolhapure) and gave them free of cost to people to screen it. Then I took cans of my film in a backpack across the country to convince people to screen it. I have a certain responsibility as a filmmaker, I'll live up to it,“ he promises.

He further adds that every year he will return to the Film Bazaar in Goa as a producer and not a director, with subjects that interest him. This year he is at the festival with Avani Rai's documentary feature, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait on her father, award-winning photographer, Raghu Rai. The movie has been selected in the Work In Progress labs and is being mentored and presented by Anurag. “The film will be touring the festival circuit all year long in 2016,“ he says. He points out that even though he has now reached a place where he can directly get funding for his films and does not have to depend on a bazaar, the new pattern of surrogate advertising has captured his interest. “Alcohol companies are a boon for filmmakers,“ he laughs at his statement's literal connotation. “If no one is funding you, go to those people who cannot advertise, make an alcohol company support you. Everybody is fighting for space and this is the way out.“