At the agency I work for, I once asked an influencer on my team to direct a spoken poetry video. It was a conceptual narrative with every chance of collapsing under a first-time storyteller.
She panicked. She yelled that she had never directed in her life. That flash of fear was real—rare in professional environments where most of us behave like tamed horses.
But once in a while, my antics bring out the wild side. This was her outburst.
I stayed calm. “You’re doing it. That’s the end of the discussion. Come to me when you have a ready-to-publish video.”
Two weeks later, the film went live on YouTube. When it came to me for review, I gave a simple thumbs up—without a single revision note. Highly uncharacteristic of me, since I’m notorious for verbose feedback. But there was nothing to add and nothing to remove. It worked as it was.
Months later, another spoken poetry project. This time, I paired the influencer with a talent manager. Together, they broke rules, scrapped one version, rebuilt another, and reimagined the narrative to fit their vision. Once again, the result went online with no notes from me.
In my career, approving something on first go is as rare as a blue moon.
And yet, when I give the same freedom to professionals—aspiring filmmakers, cinematographers, editors, people who live and breathe cinema—the outcome is almost always half-baked. Directionless narratives. First drafts that don’t even deserve consideration.
When you mingle with filmmakers or writers, or step into any cinephile circle, you’ll hear it within minutes:
- “Well, as Tarkovsky said about time in cinema…”
- “This reminds me of García Márquez’s approach to magical realism…”
- “Obviously, I was channeling Kurosawa’s use of weather as character…”
- “Like Neruda, I wanted to bring sensuality into language…”
- “It’s the kind of ambiguity Eliot was aiming for in The Waste Land…”
- “In this scene, I was inspired by Ray’s ability to capture the small and the infinite together…”
- “You know, this reminds me of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s restraint…”
- “My dialogue rhythms draw a lot from Gulzar’s poetics…”
- “I was thinking of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s way of letting dread seep into the frame…”
This isn’t conversation—it’s a test. A secret handshake. A way of cashing in on someone else’s talent, hoping that in the glow of legends, one will appear luminous too. It’s not storytelling. It’s smuggling.
And it happens so automatically, so unconsciously, most don’t even realize they’re doing it.
I’ve sat through pitch meetings where someone spent fifteen minutes explaining how their story was “influenced by some great filmmaker’s narrative style.” Depending on their exposure, it would be anyone from Kashyap to Kubrick. And I’d sit there thinking: just tell me what the story is actually about.
I’ve watched writers deflect feedback about confusing narratives by invoking Borges’ labyrinthine structures, as if mentioning the master magically justified the gaps in their own narratives.
The pattern is always the same: when pressed to explain their creative choices, when asked why this scene exists or what that character represents, they reach not inward to their own understanding, but outward to someone else’s authority.
I’ve met writers who can recite Hemingway’s iceberg theory verbatim but have never discovered what lies beneath the surface of their own stories. They know Campbell’s hero’s journey like scripture but can’t identify the emotional core of their own work.
When these writers are asked to tell a simple story about a person wanting something and facing obstacles? Suddenly, all that theoretical knowledge becomes a barrier, not a bridge.
Usually, in such moments, when their creative instincts are questioned, out comes the academic artillery. The dead masters are summoned to validate what the living creator cannot defend on their own terms.
The borrowed authority becomes a crutch. And with that crutch, they never learn to stand on their own legs.
To me, this is intellectual cowardice disguised as erudition.
The tragedy isn’t just that name-dropping reveals insecurity—it’s that it blocks the development of a personal voice.
And the industry rewards it. When someone displays this trick, instead of skepticism, they receive a nod of respect. One con artist tipping his hat to another.
That creates a false hierarchy where film school graduates assume they understand storytelling better than someone who simply tells a story.
These are professionals who can quote Eisenstein on montage. They can recite Kuleshov’s principle like a catechism. They know Syd Field’s three-act structure by heart. They can analyze the color symbolism in Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy for hours.
And yet, when given a camera and freedom, what comes out is timid, half-baked, lifeless. All knowledge, no pulse. They’re so busy proving they’ve studied the masters that they forget to ask what their story needs.
The irony is that the masters these professionals cite didn’t become masters by parroting their influences. They had something to say—and the audacity to say it.
Every time someone invokes their names to validate their own work, they’re betraying the very principle that made those masters great.
That’s why I bet on the black sheep in my team. They were free of borrowed knowledge. Which meant they could actually create.
The influencer and the talent manager had what the theory-collectors lacked: the courage to trust their gut and the nerve to tell a story without flinching.
They didn’t need Bergman’s permission to explore internal landscapes. They didn’t need Antonioni’s blessing to hold a long take. They didn’t need any framework but their own conviction.
They asked one question and followed it wherever it led:
What serves the story I’m trying to tell?
That’s what separates real storytellers from theory collectors. Real storytellers develop internal compasses. They trust their instincts about what works, what feels false, what moves an audience, what leaves them cold.
The uncomfortable truth is that storytelling isn’t a gated community for the well-read or the well-trained. It isn’t the property of filmmakers with encyclopedic recall or poets with perfect references. Storytelling is no one’s property and everyone’s domain.
You don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t need academic checkpoints or theoretical passports. You don’t need to prove your bookshelf or filmography is bigger than someone else’s.
Since the first human told a story around the first fire, the only qualification has been having something worth saying—and the courage to bleed on the page while you say it in your own voice.
Those with something real to say will talk about their characters, their conflicts, their discoveries, their failures, their breakthroughs.
Those with nothing will talk about influences, theories, and references. They’ll explain how their work relates to other people’s work instead of saying what it actually is.
Poets, authors, filmmakers—the real ones—don’t drop names like currency. They burn through their own obsessions, their own failures, their own questions.
What no one admits is that it’s easier to hide behind borrowed genius than to face the risk of your own mediocrity. They quote masters not because they understand them, but because they’re terrified of trusting themselves.
If you actually have something to say, you’ll bleed on the page—or on film—and let the mess speak. The audience doesn’t care what theories you studied; they care only about what they felt when the story hit them.