Between The Lines: Four Indian Screenwriters Break Down One Film That Shaped Their Art

Cinema, at its core, is a visual medium. But beneath all the captivating camera angles and lighting, cinematography and mise-en-scènes is the one thing that holds it all together: the story. A story, when told well, transforms a narrative into something intimate and alive; a totally different animal. It opens up a new way of seeing, moves us in unprecedented ways, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, alters something fundamental within us.

For artists that dive into filmmaking, that feeling is usually tied to a particular film; a pivotal work that redefines not just how they watch movies, but how they visualise and write them. We spoke to four Indian screenwriters and asked them to talk about one film that has lodged itself deep within their creative consciousness.

For screenwriter Arpita Chatterjee, who wrote 'Three Of Us', the turning point came with 'American Beauty' and the way Alan Ball wrote it, embedding deeper politics into everyday actions of characters. “I read the screenplay several times and realised how the deeper politics of a story can be portrayed without spelling it out," she says. Arpita points how Lester Burnham’s sexual frustration became the lens through which Ball explored the emptiness of American materialism and the loneliness of suburban life. Each character led a double life, revealing the hypocrisy and disillusionment of society, which was written with both humour and an undercurrent of darkness.

What really stayed with her though, was the plastic bag scene. Ricky, a troubled teenager, trying to find his place in the world is mesmerised and moved by a plastic bag swirling in the wind — finding beauty in the most insignificant things. The idea that storytelling could elevate the mundane; that beauty didn’t need grandeur, is something she now seeks out in every story she writes. The revelation wasn’t in the drama, but in the stillness of the sublime.

Saumyananda Sahi, known for 'Shadowbox', has been deeply influenced by a lot of filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Yasujiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray and more. But it was Gus Van Sant’s 'Elephant' that expanded his understanding of screenwriting.

Initially, it didn’t strike him as a favourite. But over time, and repeated viewings, the film took root. Elephant is loosely based on the Columbine school shooting, but it doesn’t lean into narrative spectacle. Instead, it unfolds like a slow, inevitable drift toward tragedy. “It unravels this terrible event at its core, as if peeling an onion," he says.

What stood out to him wasn’t just the structure but the way time worked in the film. “There is the inexorable pull of fate,” he notes, “and yet the hours leading up to the shoot-out almost become a frozen block.” He likens the structure to a video game, where you move through the same world again and again, following different characters, choosing alternate paths. The suspense isn’t in the ‘what’. We know what’s coming. it’s in the ‘who’; who lives, who dies, and who walks unknowingly into the crossfire.

The film also made the writer aware of expressive tools beyond the dialogue. Its characters barely talked. Instead, so much is told through the way they walk, what they wear, the music that accompanies them. “Seeing Elephant made me aware of how just by bearing witness, the camera records and expresses not only an appearance but also what a person might be feeling," he shares. He talks about how cinema can open a direct window into life; how everything in the frame, even a twitch of the face or the way someone keeps their kitchen, carries meaning.

Saumyananda also reflects on how stories are built around a character’s intention — what they want, and how they try to get it. Elephant, on the other hand, made him think more deeply about how fate and chance shape who we are; things like where we’re born, the families we grow up in, and the people we cross paths with. For him, storytelling isn’t just about what a character wants, but also about the unpredictable forces that influence their lives.

From this quiet, elliptical approach to structure, we shift to something altogether more rousing with Satyanshu Singh, the National Award-winning filmmaker and writer behind 'Chintu Ka Birthday' & 'Udaan', whose journey into screenwriting was shaped by 'Lagaan'. He was 17 when he watched it, preparing for medical entrance exams in Delhi. The film had already generated buzz, but when word got around that it revolved around a Cricket match, he was disappointed. “We were hoping for something powerful and meaningful,” he recalls. “Cricket sounded... trivial.”

And yet, when the film began, it slowly pulled him in. He remembers the sync sound, the dialect-laden dialogue by KP Saxena, the Bhojpuri and Brajbhasha inflections that felt so rooted in place and yet unfamiliar in mainstream cinema. “I wondered how people from other parts of India would react to this. But for me, it was magnetic," he says.

The scenes that followed — the introduction of Bhuvan in the forest, the king refusing to eat meat, and the sweeping choreography of 'Ghanan Ghanan', built a world both theatrical and grounded. By the time the cricket match emerged as the central plot, he was already emotionally invested. What fascinated him later, as a teacher of screenwriting, was the structure. The second act, with its slow build-up of Bhuvan assembling a team, was ingenious. “It made the story feel like it was constantly moving forward, and gave every secondary character a distinct reason to be there," he explains.

His love for the film also stems from the kind of protagonist Lagaan gave us: the underdog with a strong inner belief. “Bhuvan doesn’t change much. He already knows what he believes in. He’s misunderstood, even dismissed. But eventually, he changes the world around him.” This has crept into Satyanshu's own writing over the years with characters like Chintu’s father or Sunil Gupta in 'Black Warrant', who aren’t powerful in the conventional sense, but possess a quiet conviction that ultimately shapes the people around them.

Where Lagaan moves as an epic tale and grand emotional crescendos, 'Aftersun' whispers its way into the psyche. This coming-of-age drama is something the Kochi-based film writer/director Sumi Mathai who created 'Detour' and 'Ullarivu' swears by. The debut feature by Charlotte Wells hit her like a “gut punch and a knife twist to the heart”, leaving her in tears. “The weight of someone else’s grief sat heavily in my throat,” she says. That confusion, that awe, led to obsession. She watched it repeatedly, read the screenplay, listened to interviews, and dissected every frame.

Aftersun slips between memory and the present; between what happened and how we remember it. Its structure is non-linear, but never self-indulgent. It mirrors the instability of memory; how it fractures and shifts in hindsight, confabulation. What moved her was how little the film explained and how much it trusted the viewer to engage with what was not said. “This rare and benevolent act of trusting the audience, is something I’ve come to embrace as a cornerstone of my own screenwriting practice," she tells us.

Alice Rohrwacher another filmmaker that Sumi admires for the same reason, likes to start her films in darkness to spark the viewer’s imagination. When there’s nothing to see, the audience begins creating the film in their own minds. It’s her way of inviting them to become part of the storytelling.

Aftersun approaches this obscurity in Its visual language as well. “Many shots are framed in a way that makes the audience feel uncomfortably placed in the most private and intimate moments of the characters,” she notes. The visual motif of reflections: Calum seen in mirrors and on camcorder screens, speaks to memory as something partial, distorted, and tender. And perhaps more than anything else, the film reminds her that we may never fully grasp what makes a story powerful. “But when you see one, you know," she muses. "And in that moment, you learn what cinema is and what it can be all over again."

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