"Exploring the harmony between emotions and cinema, where musicality takes precedence over craftsmanship, transforming films into authentic, heartfelt expressions that connect deeply with audiences and creators alike." Kabeer Khurana writes…

Photography: Vinta Nanda

Cinema thrives on emotional honesty, bridging the gap between filmmakers and audiences through rhythm and musicality. Filmmaking is an intimate, personal journey, where true artistry emerges from emotional resonance rather than calculated craftsmanship. By prioritizing the instinctive harmony of music in scripting, direction, and editing, filmmakers can create relatable, tactile cinema that connects deeply with viewers. This approach not only redefines filmmaking as art over craft but also unites entire crews in a shared emotional vision, fostering collaboration. Discover how embracing musicality in cinema can lead to timeless, universally resonant films.

Highlights:

1. Emotional Honesty Over Craftsmanship: Films resonate deeply when filmmakers prioritize heartfelt, spontaneous expression over manipulative or calculated techniques.
2. Musicality as Central to Filmmaking: The rhythm of music shapes every phase of filmmaking, from scripting to editing, creating authentic emotional connections.
3. Collaborative Emotional Alignment: A united crew emotionally attuned to the film's musicality ensures the authenticity of the cinematic experience.

A film should be more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. – Stanley Kubrick

Chamomile-scented incense. The spreading carpet in the living room. Candle flames, casting their giant shadows upon walls. The tinted-glass paintings. Meditation mantras playing softly in the background.

Flashes. Just flashes of reminiscences…some still alive, most long forgotten. Memories of a time and space that once existed, but ones that I yearn to revisit. This, through the films I make.

Finding the musicality of your film

I see filmmaking as an intensely personal, and in many ways, selfish act – a pursuit of emotional satisfaction that allows a filmmaker to relive past experiences through the artifice of a constructed world. Filmmaking is making a connection with your inner life, finding a rhythm and expressing passions with uncompromising honesty – a less cerebral, more musical process. Be it in the scripting, the pre-production, shoot, editing, or even the digital intermediate, music provides an instinctive vision to the makers to not just wrap their heads around, but break into and connect with intimately. Good films don’t emerge from clever concepts alone; they resonate because of the emotional honesty with which they are crafted. In fact, a director’s emotional disconnect with a scene does come across to the audience, and the effort and focus, therefore, should lie in making our films more convincing and expressive – nailing the ability to authentically translate what the creators feel onto screen. This emotional authenticity can only be achieved when filmmakers connect more deeply with their subjects, or find the melody and rhythm of their film. If the film isn’t told with heartfelt emotional honesty, even the most brilliant concept will fail to resonate.

Making Cinema Tactile

In my opinion, the pursuit of every filmmaker should lie in trying to understanding himself better, and in making a closer connection with his inner life. The truer the director is to his own emotions, the more relatable his film is likely to be. This connection can be further strengthened by a certain sense of musicality, and by making music central to the cinematic experience – that is, truly giving ‘audio’ precedence over ‘visual’ in this so-called audio-visual medium. Of course, this would also mean a radical re-assessing of our existing methods and procedural norms of making films, as, in our current methods, the script and performances are central to the process. In re-looking at music as the highest order in movie making, I do see more convincing and heart-warming films being produced…films that reduce the distance between the audience and the filmmakers, making cinema more tactile. It was in fact literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of novelization that conveyed the idea of reducing the distance between the narrative and the readers, by breaking the age-old canonical constructs of epic or lyric poetry literature – that is, writing literature that were less panegyric or romanticized, and more relatable and honest. While this was an idea that was proposed in 1941, I feel that there still exists a very strong distance between Bollywood cinema and its audiences, which is seen in the fact that our ‘tinsel town’ (super)heroes are highly valorized, and are perceived as lofty, completed individuals who are far beyond the tactile reach of the audience. Unfortunately, this ‘town’ is a ‘walled’ one i.e., it builds boundaries that block it off from the present. Thus, there exists an impending need to create more novelized cinema, that audiences can intimately speak to and not just romanticize from a distance, but passionately make love to.

Cinema then, for filmmakers, becomes simply an art of connection…first with yourself, then automatically the audience. Movie making is about finding a rhythm and expressing a strong sense of individualism. The deeper intimacy you share with your art, the closer the audience connects with it. Bound by the common human emotions such as hope, desire, anxiety, etc., our emotions are universally relatable, however rarely expressed with complete honesty. This is either due to the fact that we’re systemically designed to veil our true emotions, or we just haven’t connected well enough with our inner lives. Either way, I do truly believe that filmmakers, in India especially and collectively, do need to relook at the way they perceive cinema – do we see it as art, or as craft?

  

Looking at Cinema as Art (and not Craft)

Cinema is a spontaneous and intuitive play of emotions, stemming from musical responses. However, there are several films today, which visibly lack an emotional honesty and sincerity on the part of filmmakers to genuinely feel for the characters they’re weaving into their films. For these films, the pretentiousness and the disconnection of the makers with the film is evident to the audiences. A filmmaker may set himself the task of arousing or manipulating a certain emotional response in an audience. In this respect, it is an honorable and skillful craftsmanship, requiring great technical skill, but the lack of emotional honesty does come through. Maximum emotional impact (on the audience) is created when the intent of the filmmakers isn’t pre-meditated, but is a spontaneous, heart-felt and intuitive piece of emotional exploration – films that are made by simply “living on the inside.” This wholehearted emotional journey that the filmmaker goes through while making a film, separates a piece of art from merely a piece of craftsmanship.

In my opinion, the job of a filmmaker isn’t to manipulate the emotions of the audience, but to go through an emotional exploration of his own during the entire process.  Perhaps, his job is also to stand in the same relationship to the outcome as his audience – trying to understand, clarify and find out just as much about his own work, as if he’s seeing it for the first time. Films made with artistic integrity are the ones in which the filmmaker doesn’t take up the role of a stage magician or a conjurer, manipulating the emotions of his audience, but has actually gone through an emotional and expressive journey of his own to create an honest piece of art, rather than a pre-conceived work of craftsmanship. Films like these are made more out of love for cinema than from a lust to meet box-office targets. These filmmakers just purely follow their heart and flow with their own musicality.

Here, it’s interesting to observe that unlike popular perception, it’s not just actors that follow a method, but filmmakers as well. The method that I speak about, of course, is closer to the Stanislavski Method than the Meisner Technique of acting. Stanislavski sought to encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances, rather than pre-planned and rehearsed acting. These ‘art-house’ filmmakers did the same – most creation happened on the basis of what they felt and experienced intuitively during filming.

Engaging the Crew

To me, a significant part of filmmaking lies in uniting the crew within a shared emotional space, ensuring they connect seamlessly with the film's musicality and the director’s vision. In this grand, collaborative art form called cinema, every crew member must grasp not just the technical aspects of what is being shot, but also the mood, tone, rhythm, and emotional undercurrents of the scene. This alignment is crucial—the director’s responsibility is not limited to setting the mood in front of the camera but extends to fostering the right atmosphere behind it as well.

The authenticity and honesty of a scene’s emotion can only translate onto the screen if the entire crew—not just the director and actors—is attuned to the scene’s emotional resonance. One of the most effective ways to set this tone is by briefing the crew with reference music tracks that encapsulate the emotional progression of the scene. These tracks act as a unifying thread, helping everyone on set to move in harmony.

From my own experiences, I’ve learned that creating the mood for a scene through lighting or performance is insufficient if the rest of the crew isn’t emotionally aligned with what’s being filmed. When crew members don’t feel the scene as deeply and tenderly as the director and performers, they risk becoming distractions, breaking the flow needed to sustain the moment until the shot is complete. All it takes is one small interruption for the actors, cinematographer, or recordist to lose their rhythm.

On the other hand, when the crew embraces the film’s creative vision and musicality, the process becomes profoundly collaborative. Filmmaking then transcends being a singular, auteur-driven endeavor and evolves into a confluence of creative minds. The energy on set rises organically, passions ignite, and everyone channels their spiritual and creative energies into a collective pursuit.

A truly powerful work of art is one where emotional discovery becomes a shared journey—where over two hundred individuals in a film unit contribute their unique artistry to create something timeless and universally resonant.

Editing with Emotional Honesty

Identifying and connecting with the musicality of a film is extremely critical for an editor. Whether the beats are in the scene or in the dialogues, every film has a rhythm to it which must be latched on to. Accomplished editors often use metronomes to edit silent/non-dialogue scenes, to bring out a certain pattern and musicality in the edit. In my own films, I’ve always edited scenes to a music piece that best defined the pace and rhythm of that scene.

Film direction, for me, has always been about living the film while it’s being shot – connecting with your soul and intuition, and communicating emotions with honesty. In my opinion, the moment you’re making a film with an external objective, (of awards, rewards, or other) it ceases to be a deeply intimate emotional exploration of the filmmaker. It then becomes a work of pre-meditated craftsmanship, but the art is missing…the focus of the filmmaker shifts to manipulating the emotions of the audience than living and communicating his own with honesty. The best films are the ones that filmmakers have made for themselves. The moment you’re keeping the emotions of your audience in mind while making a film, you’re disconnected from your own. The effort for me has always been to ensure that not only are my films designed and inspired by music, but are like music itself. Cinema is finding musical harmony in collaboration.

  

Here’s a link to my short film ism (2016). A short film that I had made when I was 17, the entire concept, visualization, rhythm, editing and music, was inspired from a 1995 film called Repete (or rather the soundtrack of it). So far, my films have always been conceptualized, scripted and visualized around music.  

ism (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ds-9CNyXo

Repete (1995): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaUyaLZSoTc