I write to you from under a hurricane.

Let’s get back into it.

Thank you all for bearing with me during the last stretch of essays. That was an intense set of circumstances that came at an intense point of time for me, an admittedly intense kind of person. I think the pieces reflected that. After publishing, I had to take a little time off, because I was a bit sick of the sound of my own voice, and didn't want to be a downer in my friends’ inboxes any longer. Writing, for me, is a processing tool, and processing, to me, invites progress. If I were to write an essay that let my readers know that I was in a better place, I think I would write about something I love. And that should be easy, given that a few weeks ago, I shot my first feature film.

The film was totally independent and self financed, nonunion, but in the spirit of the SAG strike, I won’t talk too much about the particulars of the project. All I’ll say is that it was my first time leading a feature, and for two weeks of this month, I lived a dream come true. I’m grateful for the blessing. I love being a part of The Movies. I think it’s a profession and an art form worth celebration and defense. 

On movies:

Since adolescence, especially after studying Theatre at college, I’ve been heavily inclined towards esoteric discussion concerning the arts. There is a part of me that is always trying to see past the mundane to access the awe that I’ve felt when faced with the great products of human inspiration. At the same time, cerebral discussion often leaves me bogged down, craving the visceral enjoyment of work that evades critique and categorization. Sometimes, I seek the trite and artificially sweetened. Sometimes, the gritty and confounding. My life’s project of developing my own taste in all the humanities have to offer is incredibly dear to me. I could write for the next decade about my Spotify playlists and weekends spent gallery hopping. In fact, I plan to. But film has provided me with a unique comfort during the turbulence of my early 20s. It has become a home. 

As an Indian-American person, I am lucky to have grown up with access to huge wells of reference material in two prolific cinematic traditions shared by scores of people who I know and love. While my parents could care less about the Chekov I studied at school, they crave the saccharine feel-good flick or suspenseful drama available on streaming. My younger cousins fiend for Marvel and Harry Potter-esque franchises, as I did in my youth; my grandmother watches Kollywood and I’ve followed along with subtitles ever since I learned how to read. Growing up, my sister and I bonded over princess movies and DCOMs. I’ve balanced this out in adulthood with a mental library of Wes Anderson brackets and mob movies. I fixate on the work of auteurs. 

Of course, everyone I hang out with is on Letterboxd. Although I put a lot of personal toil into the administration of a 3.5 star rating versus a 4, my appreciation for film is not a means toward cementing a hierarchy of taste, but rather a process of understanding how shit works, and why? To me, every movie is an opportunity to learn, and every subset of taste, every inch of the tongue, deserves a chance. I am an open audience member, and want my mental Blockbuster Video to carry as wide a selection as possible. Because to understand how a kind of movie feels, how it works, and to be exposed to how those filmmakers see the world, is to more deeply understand how the people I care for do as well. 

Not to mention, I live in Los Angeles. Living and working in Hollywood comes with a sense of being “in the know,” despite the distance nearly everyone seems to have from the industry’s closed doors and plastered towers. There are, of course, many different lives being lived in this city, and the film focused are only one of the many loving communities I inhabit. However, I feel deeply seen by thoughtful, compelling artists driven by integrity and ambition, who make their home in LA. As far as we are from success, we also could be not far at all, and I fully believe that many people I know are deserving and talented enough to strike gold. Eventually. Maybe. Not that it matters.

While “striking gold” is no safe bet, the attempt is worth more than the reward. To desire intangible progress, to work against the odds, and to continue the timeless tradition of humankind’s dedication to the arts is a gift. I believe that pressure makes diamonds of spectacular form. To work without the promise of profit can create stunning honesty and imbue a person with divine tenacity. That justifies the gamble of taking what is, at least for someone of my background, a road far less traveled.

The products of unrelenting dedication to craft add things that are genuinely intricate or engaging or insightful or cathartic or colorful to the world. In the same way that a house becomes a home when art adorns the walls, all of life’s decor is essential. Regardless of what the future has in store, I can’t imagine looking back at the lessons gained from that pursuit with regret. But who knows. Maybe someday this will be a newsletter about banking or something.

On set:

The on-set environment consistently beats every other workplace I’ve ever had. It presents a beautiful model for human collaboration: one where each person is entirely unique, distinct in what they bring to the table, and every single person is completely essential. As an actor, to be not just accepted, but NEEDED for a craft that is sometimes very inextricable from the deepest most honest parts of you, is cosmically healing. 

My individual work is fascinating to me: to work a scene is to set the pace for an imagined moment in a life being briefly and voluntarily lived. It reflects and also completely rejects the actual experience of being alive. The work is, at times, to weave psychology with (and against) biology with (and against) time with (and against) emotion, while every intricate detail of the moments you create are captured with audiovisual technology that is constantly developing, and takes experienced and precise hands and eyes to maneuver correctly. What is created in return defies imitation. A piece of cinema realized is a collection of moments in time that had never been seen before and could never be recreated in a way that fully captured its temporal essence. 

Aside from this^ which is potentially the most annoyingly indulgent passage I’ve ever written, are the invaluable in-between moments: Traded half sentences around tables of snacks; learning the arbitrary coffee preferences of people you hardly know; hours of fleeting introductions and small talk followed by the over-hearing of under-qualified therapy sessions between setups. And when this combination of work and play, of work that is play, of play that is work, eventually culminates in the camaraderie of getting the moment, it is only achieved because everyone involved did exactly what only they could do. Every day on set is a week and every week is a month and every month is a day again. To me, heaven is not a beach or a throne, so much as it is that place where time contorts. 

In the Theater, an actor spends most of their time in a rehearsal room surrounded by other actors, a director and a stage manager; maybe occasionally a playwright, and even more rarely, technical designers on the production. On a film set, these artists are constantly woven together. What is seen on screen is hardly the core of the organism, which extends past the camera and the boom pole, through the grip & electrical team tasked with manipulating light to enhance a manufactured universe, and out to video village, where a first AC might remotely focus the camera, dialed in on the whites of our eyes. 

I’ve grown to admire the teams of filmmakers that bring each other onto project after project, and thus function as a well oiled machine. Many experienced crew members and technical artists that I know are able to work on set as their main form of income, and I envy this making of living. I admire the technical knowledge of gaffers, camera operators, and sound recordists, and how the tangibility of their skills contrasts those that I bring to set. I repeatedly develop a voyeuristic, naive fascination with their whispers of jargon and shared sense of humor that I can ultimately only pretend I am truly inside of. 

In 2021, on set for a film I had co-written, a sound professor employed as our recordist talked to me about how cuts within a film keep us engaged by mimicking the sensation of blinking. He posited that low, loud sound designs trigger our anxiety when used in a film by reminding our biology of our natural predators and environmental threats. Over post-set $5 Chile’s margaritas in Evanston, our cinematographer expands on how the lens of the camera plagiarizes the light-catching infrastructure of the human eye. A great movie is a living organism. Those who make them see the world in a way I find endlessly fascinating. If you want to expand the boundaries of your music taste, ask a sound person what they’re listening to. If you seek to be visually stunned, ask a gaffer for their watch list. 

I’ve found that this respect is mutual. The post scene fist bumps for the actors always come first from the crew. Although my skills are intangible, they are necessary, and the responsibility to do my best work is heightened with the knowledge that everyone around me is doing the same. It feels like harmony. For years, I was used to the stage, where at the end of a show, we bow and gesture to the booth. And I love how on set, sharing the floor, we all constantly bow to each other. 

Filmmaking is a process wherein human experience becomes literature; that literature impacts psychology; that psychology affects biology, which is captured by technology and synthesized into a work of philosophy. It is a chief achievement of our species and creates medicine for our souls. Good film, like any good art, reflects life back at us, giving us images, quotations, and the music that helps us reckon with our troubles and our joy. The direction we all travel in our lives consistently pivots ever so slightly after engaging with meaningful work. At the heart of drama comes the promise that we go forth stronger after watching what others have endured. 

Shooting this movie was a dream come true, but came with its own difficulties. To make it through the shoot with my health intact, I was socially recluse and thus, plagued with fomo. I was exhausted by long hours shooting in the hot sun. My brain, with 100+ pages of material memorized, felt like a sore, aching muscle. Overall, this restored my faith in and humility towards my passion, reassuring me that the pursuit of my dreams is not a chase towards unattainable utopia. Acting is not frivolous fantasy so much as it is a dream of labor. My mind and body were worn down, and it was as fulfilling and affirming as I ever could have imagined. At all times I simultaneously knew, and failed to consider, that it could end. And doesn’t that contradiction lie in all labors of love?

On odds, and advice:

This probably goes without saying, but I think it’s very important to chase your dreams, despite the challenges that come with it. You only get one life, and any day, it could end. Usually, whenever someone asks me for any form of advice, my words boil down to some variation of “follow your heart,” probably because those are always the words that I hope someone will tell me. 

In general, I think when we ask for guidance in this life, what people tell us always communicates more about their journey than our own. I will always tell others to chase their dreams, because I hope others will always tell me the same. I think when asked for advice, we all feel a responsibility to encourage each other to do the hard things.

Despite the odds, we tell others to chase their dreams, to take roads less traveled, to tell people when they have hurt us, or when we desire them, or to do both at the same time. We tell others to write the project, to ask for the raise, to be bold when we can. When we are asked for help, we answer by asking for help in return. We ask others to have the courage to do what we cannot, as if we can show each other the way. 

At many times in my life, I’ve put on a movie or listened to an album, looked at a great product of human inspiration, and asked it to show me the way. In the hard moments of life. The moments where despite trying to remember, I forget. And the moments when despite trying to forget, I remember.

I ask that you do the same. I ask you to follow your dreams, and thus help me follow mine. The odds aren’t so bad.

I mean, it’s more likely that this all works out than it is that I go into banking or something. 

If you made it to the end, I’m curious about you. Who are you? What dreams are you chasing? What questions do you have?

Respond, and tell me something about yourself. Maybe we can do a little better together.