A decade after the commercial failure of Bombay Velvet (2015), filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has reflected on how the experience affected his relationships with its stars Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma.

“I think Ranbir was very upset, and he keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep talking about Bombay Velvet? Just ignore it. The film didn’t work, but you don’t have to talk about it all the time.’ But people ask me questions all the time, how can I just ignore that?” he told Screen.

Kashyap also recalled his hesitation in facing the lead actors after the film’s failure and admitted to becoming distant from them: “We don’t meet often. Whenever we meet, we just hug and greet each other. And at the beginning, I just didn’t know how to face them because they had given me a lot of trust and love. And I was dealing with my own demons. So I needed to come out of that and make a very small film and was very focused on Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). But slowly, we became distant.”

The 2015 neo-noir period drama, which also featured Karan Johar, collected only Rs. 43 crore worldwide against its Rs. 118 crore budget.