It all started with Mulholland Drive. Before that, movies were just a bunch of cool, good-looking people saying and doing cool things. I never bothered myself knowing the director’s name or the writer’s name. Then when I was in Class 10, I stumbled upon a movie called Mulholland Drive. After I finished it, I was so frustrated with myself because I couldn’t understand it. That was the first time I couldn’t follow a plot. What is this? Who is this for? Why is this? All these questions made me suffer my existence. Today, I can finally attest to why Mulholland made such a mark on me. It is because I felt it. It puzzled me. I questioned myself. Yes, the understanding part of it made me agitated but that was because I was so fascinated with every scene of the film. Particularly that ‘fear’ scene. After Mulholland Drive, I came to know one thing, movies are not just linear storylines with cool people facing a certain problem in their life which they then overcome throughout the movie. It is a collection of moving images that make you think and feel.
As much as I liked Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Wild at Heart, and everything else David Lynch has made. I knew that it was not my style. So for the next 5 years, I embarked upon a cinematic journey of finding films that resonated with me. I started region-wise. I found myself particularly enchanted with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. It has a deeper impact on us Bengalis.
I was starting to grasp the individual styles of each director and how they made me feel. For example, I enjoy both Quentin Tarantino’s films and Takeshi Kitano’s films. Tarantino made me jump out of the chair in excitement. He made me feel hysteric during wanton acts of Violence. I felt elated after Django Unchained. But I connected with Kitano’s Hanabi. I connected with that environment that his films have in common. That stillness. That silence between the two characters. And I knew there and then that there is a genre out there for me. I searched and searched and I finally found that stillness I was looking for, films that didn’t look like films but rather pieces of life. I found Asian directors: Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Hong soo-sang, Naomi Kawase, Yasujiro Ozu, Ryuichi Hiroki, Hiroshi Ishikawa, Wong Kar-wai, Edward Yang, etc. They made films that resembled my vision. They wrote conversations that I wanted to have.
I knew I wanted to make films when I started to see my entire life as one giant plot. Yes, It’s not that interesting. But, what if today when go brush my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, I don’t see my reflection? That sheer curiosity drives me to write 10 pages and storyboard like hell.