Making a film is like spreading a religion

I see filmmaking as an act of faith. An idea begins in my imagination, then gathers believers among actors, producers and collaborators, and eventually reaches strangers who make the story their own. 

But as I prepare to return to cinema after serving as Bangladesh's cultural adviser for over a year, I face a changing industry, marked by shrinking theatrical opportunities, reluctant streaming platforms and audiences increasingly accustomed to short-form content. 

At the Busan International Film Festival this year, I reflected on the relationships that sustain independent cinema, the importance of what a filmmaker leaves unseen, and why storytelling remains an exercise in human empathy.

I delivered these reflections at the Busan Platform on October 12, during a session titled “From Idea to Audience: Building an Ecosystem,” moderated by Variety’s Asia Editor Naman Ramachandran. 

Before I begin, I must make one thing clear—I’m not here to tell anyone how to make a film. I’m not a teacher. I’m still a student—a student of the World University of Mistakes.

Before every film, I go through many of the same challenges a debut filmmaker goes through. The same doubts. The same uncertainties. The same question: how am I going to make this film happen? There is no singular formula.

I want to look back at my journey to find the way forward for my next film. I find myself at an interesting juncture in my career. I slid off the track and took up the job of Cultural Minister in Bangladesh. I had doubts before I accepted the job. But I took courage from the Korean master filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, who once accepted such a role and later returned to filmmaking. Now I am waiting to get back to filmmaking.

As I prepare to return, I find myself thinking about the world in which we are making films today. Because cinema doesn’t exist in isolation. It is part of society. As society changes, as our habits change, cinema changes too. We are living in what I would call the age of reels and restlessness.

We scroll from one short reel to the next. I wonder what this constant movement is doing to our patience with longer stories. Algorithms tell us to hook an audience in the first few seconds. Does this change the way we write films, even without our realizing it?

I suspect it does.

I notice how rare silence has become in many studio films—not only silence in sound, but visual silence too. A person sitting, thinking, or simply looking. A moment in which the audience is free to observe and imagine.

Perhaps we’re afraid that if an image stays still for too long, the audience will lose interest. With these challenges facing cinema as an art form, I am preparing to start my second innings as a filmmaker.

As I think about this second innings, these questions come to mind.

Filmmaking, to me, is a journey through a web of relationships—from a filmmaker’s imagination to an ocean of strangers. An idea starts privately inside you. Relationships begin to form around it. People enter that idea, question it, challenge it, strengthen it, help make it possible—and eventually help it travel towards an audience you have never met.

I want to share how I have travelled through that web of relationships.

Why do we tell stories?

Why does a human being feel the need to tell a story?

Telling stories is one of our most basic human instincts. In a way, this is what makes us human. We have built this civilization through communication. Without communication, without our ability to articulate what we see, what we feel, what we experience, our civilization would not have come this far.

But why do we feel the need to communicate a story?

Imagine you have gone somewhere. You have visited a new place. You come back home, and whoever you meet, you start telling them what you saw there. What happened there. How it felt.

Why do human beings do that?

Because we have this basic urge to make another person feel what we are feeling. To make them see what we have seen. To make them feel something of our experience.

That is where storytelling begins. We experience something, and we want someone else to experience it too. Perhaps this urge to tell stories is also how we have carried our history, our knowledge and our memories from one generation to another. In many ways, this is how we have carried civilization forward.

When it comes to filmmaking, this is where it starts. You take something private and try to make it shared. From that moment, the journey of relationships begins.

The first relationship is inside the story

Before we build relationships around a film, we build relationships inside the film.

A character has a relationship with another character. But also with a place. With a particular moment. With a memory and with a circumstance. And also with something that happened years ago. Sometimes even with something that is absent. These relationships create the emotional world of the story.

Before I ask other people to believe in the film, I have to believe in these relationships myself. For me to believe them, they have to look authentic, feel authentic and sound authentic. If I don’t believe them, I can’t expect anyone else to.

The first believers

Filmmaking is a little like spreading a religion.

A filmmaker begins with an idea that exists only in their imagination. Nobody else has seen it. Nobody knows its shape, its colour, or what it will feel like. Yet the filmmaker is asking others to believe in something they have never seen, something that doesn't yet exist. The filmmaker is asking for their faith.

First, the producer must believe. Then the financiers, the actors, the cinematographer, the production designer, the crew. At every stage, the filmmaker is expanding the legion of believers.

Eventually, when the film is finished, the filmmaker asks an ocean of strangers, the audience, to believe in it. Filmmaking is a continuous process of spreading faith. Except that our holy book is a screenplay, and we keep rewriting it! The moment you start telling the story to other people, you face questions.

Everyone will look at the story from a different point of view. Someone may find a loophole. Something may not be clear to someone. Someone may ask a question you have never asked yourself.

The more questions you face, the better it is for the script. Because these questions force you to look at the story again. They help you discover the loopholes and they help you understand the strengths of the script.

Sometimes they give you a reason to go back and revise it. While you are trying to make other people believe in the story, their questions deepen your own understanding of it. As that circle grows, every relationship is different.

You don’t speak to an actor in exactly the same language you speak to a producer and you don’t speak to a cinematographer exactly as you speak to an editor. Each collaborator has to find their own way into the film. Slowly, what started as something private inside you begins to belong to many people.

Building the package

Let’s talk about financing. Financing an independent film has become increasingly difficult.

Theatrical spaces are shrinking. Streamers are buying fewer independent films. Even films coming out of top festivals are struggling to find buyers. So finding financiers has become much more difficult. This is how I have always tried to do it.

Instead of going to the financier first, I would rather go to the actor first. You are no longer going to a financier only with a script and your own belief in it. You now have an actor and you have another believer. And if that actor has market value, that brings weight to the package.

Then you can start looking for financing from different directions. Private equity. Film funds. Pre-sales. Co-production. Even crowdfunding. You don’t necessarily have to depend on one financier. You can build the financing, piece by piece, around the package.

Making the film

A film is made of actors, spaces and time. We experience the story through them. For me, there are two important questions. The first is casting the right actors. The second is: how do I help those actors become the people I imagined?

Preparation plays an important role here. When I work with an actor, I don’t only talk about what is written in the script. I try to give them a life much bigger than the script.

Imagine the film covers only three months of a character’s life. But if that character is 50 years old, there are almost 50 years behind those three months that we don’t see in the script.

Those invisible years are important. How was his childhood? Which school did he go to? Who were his schoolmates? Was he ever bullied at school? How was his relationship with his first girlfriend?

What kind of food does he love? Has he ever been involved in a civil case? There can be hundreds of little things. Most of them will never appear in the film. The audience may never know any of them. But the actor needs to know them.

Think about me standing here and talking to you now. I have 51 years of my life in the back of my mind. I know those years because I have lived through them.

My childhood. My relationships. My mistakes. My memories. My experiences.

I don’t consciously think about all of them every time I speak. But they are there. Those 51 years have something to do with how I talk, how I react, how I look at someone, how I respond to a situation. A character should have that life too.

If an actor is playing a 50-year-old character, I want them to know the life before page one of the screenplay. The actor needs to know that backstory. It helps them talk the way the character should talk, react the way the character should react, and eventually become that person.

The more we talk about the character and these details around the story, the clearer it becomes to the actor who this person is. That is how I want them to prepare. I want them to prepare psychologically. I don’t want their main preparation to be memorizing lines. I don’t like actors memorizing their lines.

Once you memorize your lines, you keep repeating those words in your mind—while reading the script, while preparing yourself, before coming to the set, even on the day of the shoot. When you repeat a word too many times, something happens.

The word remains the same, but your relationship with the word changes. You still know what it means, but you may stop feeling it. When you stop feeling it, the audience will stop feeling it too. That is what I don’t want to happen to an actor’s lines.

Imagine the first time in your life you said, “I love you,” to a girl or a boy. You had no template. You didn’t know how you were supposed to feel. Would you shiver? Would your voice change? Would you be able to look into their eyes?

You didn’t know, because it was happening for the first time. Now imagine saying “I love you” for the ninety-nine-thousandth time. The words are the same. But the feeling is not. By then, you have a template. You lose the feeling of it happening for the first time. That’s why I don’t want actors to act from memory. I want them to act from instinct.

I want to feel that whatever they are saying, whatever they are doing, it just happened now. I want the actor to know the character deeply—the life behind the character, the world around the character. But when the camera starts rolling, I want them to forget the preparation and live the moment.

My idea is: the more you know about the character, the less you have to act. You don’t have to perform the character. You start living the character. For me, in film, non-performance is performance.

Over the years, I have noticed that the visual language of my films has often been influenced by the inner worlds of the characters I deal with on screen. To give you two examples: in 2012, I made a film titled Television, which was the closing film here in Busan. In 2017, I made a film titled No Bed of Roses. These two films have distinctly different visual styles because the inner worlds of the characters in those films were very different. 

In Television, I dealt with colourful, eccentric, expressive people. In No Bed of Roses, I dealt with people who never express their emotions easily. The characters in that film were like islands; they never let people see their inner storms. This distinction organically shaped the visual styles during the filming process. 

The locations and weather at the time also contributed heavily to finding the visual styles and rhythms. Our relationships with location and weather are an important part of this web of relationships.

But a film is not made only at the scriptwriting table or on the shooting floor. Those are two important stages. It is at the editing table that the film is finally cooked. The most fundamental principle of editing is deciding what to show and what not to show. This process of editing begins much earlier. 

When I write a script, I choose certain events to tell the story and leave others out. When an actor performs, they make choices about what to express and what to hold back. Editing happens throughout the filmmaking process. But it is at the editing table that we finally decide what the audience will see and what they will not see.

I believe a filmmaker’s relationship with what they choose not to show is as important as their relationship with what they show. Think of any great film. Very often, its power lies in those invisible spaces, those voids, the things that are never shown. By not showing something, we invite the audience to engage their imagination, to fill in those blanks. That is how we create a relationship between the audience and the film. Those voids are not empty spaces. 

They are spaces where the audience brings something of their own into the film. For me, that is one of the most beautiful things about cinema. It is like a handshake between the filmmaker and the audience. Both have to extend their hands for that relationship to happen.

Who is my audience?

Let’s talk about the most important relationship. The film and its audience. For an independent filmmaker, there are two basic questions:

Who is my audience?

And:

How do I reach them? There are many routes we can take.

One of the most familiar is to share the film screener with festival programmers. This not only gives our film recognition, but also helps create a primary and influential community of believers. From film critics to sales agents and cinephiles, we expand the web of relationships into the wider world of audiences.

Festivals, theatrical releases, television and streaming all matter. But when independent films struggle to secure screens and buyers, we also need ways to reach audiences directly.

One such route is community screening. We have an example of this in Bangladesh. Tareque Masud was one of our pioneering independent filmmakers. His film The Clay Bird—Matir Moina—went to Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2002 and won the FIPRESCI Prize.

But before The Clay Bird, Tareque made Muktir Gaan: The Song of Freedom. He took that film across Bangladesh. He travelled across Bangladesh with screenings outside the conventional cinema system—in local auditoriums, towns and communities.

He did not wait for audiences to find the film. He took the film to them. The screenings did more than generate revenue. They generated conversations, relationships and a community around the film.

When traditional distribution is uncertain and online attention is fragmented, this model feels newly relevant. A screening can become an event, a conversation and the beginning of an audience network. It is not a replacement for cinemas or streaming, but another path for a film to travel.

This brings me back to where I started.

A film may begin privately inside one person, but it can never travel alone. From the first idea to the actor, the producer, the crew, the festival, the community and finally the audience—it is this web of relationships that allows a film to find its life in the world.

I want to end this essay on one final note: how something deeply personal becomes collective through cinema.

Every film I make is a personal film, even when it has nothing to do with my own life. When I begin telling someone else’s story, I gradually become so involved in that person’s life, so deeply affected by their experiences, that I begin to feel them in my own skin. At some point, their story becomes my story.

I believe the same thing happens to the audience. When people fall in love with a film, even if the story has nothing to do with their own lives, they begin to own it. They begin to feel that it is their story too. That is how something deeply personal becomes collective. That is how cinema creates a wave of human empathy, allowing us to feel the lives of people we have never known, perhaps people who are nothing like us.

For me, that is the ultimate power and purpose of cinema.

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