Shaitan

Shaitan (2011)

शैतान

Free Your Inner Shaitan

Five substance-abusing friends decide to fake a kidnapping in order to bribe a police constable for covering-up a hit-and-run accident.

Date of release
2011-06-01
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (54)
Runtime
2h 6m
Genres
Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director
Bejoy Nambiar

Casting

Interesting facts

Shaitan (transl. Devil) is a 2011 Indian Hindi-language neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Bejoy Nambiar in his feature film debut and produced by Anurag Kashyap, Sunil Bohra, Guneet Monga and Nambiar himself under the banners Anurag Kashyap Films and Getaway Films, which was co-produced and distributed by Viacom18 Motion Pictures. The script was written by Nambiar and Megha Ramaswamy. The film stars Rajeev Khandelwal, Kalki Koechlin, Gulshan Devaiah, Shiv Panditt, Neil Bhoopalam, Kirti Kulhari, Rajit Kapoor, Pawan Malhotra and Rajkummar Rao.

Production

Bejoy Nambiar, made a short film titled Reflections (2005) and a direct-to-television film Rahu (2008), before assisting Mani Ratnam, and served as an executive in Ratnam's production house Madras Talkies. When he won a prize for Gateway to Hollywood in 2009, Ashok Amritraj asked Nambiar to make a feature film for his Los Angeles-based production house Hyde Park Entertainment.

As he could not fulfill the enormous budget for production, Anurag Kashyap agreed to co-produce and present the film in a smaller budget. Sunil Bohra and Guneet Monga who worked as executives in Kashyap's production banner Anurag Kashyap Films, served as the co-producer.

Bejoy Nambiar approached Kalki Koechlin to play the lead role. Koechlin, who gained her breakthrough with Dev.D (2009), where her performance in the film received critical acclaim, decided to act in this film as she wanted to experiment in "dark" and "intense roles". She plays the role of a 17-year old angst-ridden teenager who had a troubled life.

Gulshan Devaiah made his feature film debut with this film by playing Karan Chaudhary (KC). In an interview with Cinestaan, Nambiar said that "his character is mostly modelled on a 1980s rock-and-roll guy, not the way he dress but how his attitude". Initially, Gulshan was auditioned for Rajeev's character Arvind Mathur, a Police Inspector and made a test shoot featuring him as a cop.

Principal shooting began during April 2010 and Nambiar planned to shoot the film within 10–12 days. After being delayed multiple times due to financial constraints, the film went on floors in October. A slow motion action sequence was the first to be canned in the shoot. The team canned a kissing sequence featuring Koechlin and Kulhari.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended