The most important thing in a film is invisible. Not the actor, not the shot, not the dialogue, but the intention behind it. Because before a film is seen, before it is heard, before it is even made, it exists as a decision. A decision about what to say, why to say it, and how far one is willing to go to say it truthfully. Everything that follows, the frames, the performances, the words, are only expressions of that first, invisible choice.
What the audience sees is the finished film. What they don’t see is the process, what lens was used, how a scene was lit, whether it was shot on digital or film, how much research went into it, how the dialogues were written. All of that exists. But intention is something deeper. It cannot simply be captured by a lens.
There is intention behind every frame. Behind every camera movement, every casting choice, every line of dialogue. Nothing on a film set is done vaguely. Whether or not the audience consciously recognizes that intention is secondary, what matters is that it exists and is paramount. As American screenwriter and film director, Aaron Sorkin puts it, “The piece of writing advice that I would give starting writers is intention and obstacle, cling to that like a lifeboat. That’s what drama is. You can’t do anything if you don’t have that, where somebody wants something and something’s standing in their way of getting it. It’s the clothesline. You can hang on that. You have to have intention and obstacle.”
Every creator approaches this differently. If you meet ten writers, you’re most likely to hear ten different processes. None of them are entirely right or wrong, they are just different. That difference is what makes cinema so vast. It’s why the same idea can be remade across the world and still feel new, because perspective changes the entire outlook.
Take the character of Joker, for example. Joker as portrayed by Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix, two performances built on the same character, yet conceived entirely differently. Both were powerful, both unforgettable. When Heath Ledger played him, the Joker felt like pure chaos, unpredictable, almost abstract, with no need for explanation. He wasn’t seeking empathy, he was disrupting it. In contrast, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker felt deeply human. His violence came from isolation and psychological decay, making you confront not just what he does, but why he becomes that way. Same character, two entirely different experiences, shaped not by plot, but by intention.
It reflects what Guillermo del Toro points towards when he says, “I learned, there is a realm that is seldom accessed, both in analysis and creation, which is the visual.” The same material, seen through different eyes, becomes something entirely new.
At the same time, filmmaking is unpredictable. Sometimes mistakes lead to something unexpectedly right. But even then, the question remains, where is the story coming from? Is it coming from an authentic place?
That’s something I think about often. As hard as writing poems can be at times, I love the process and what comes out the other end. And unlike the stories I would want to tell in future, my poems are derived from either directly my personal life or experiences around me. The one thing I love, barring whether or not they’re good because I can’t be a rightful judge of my own piece, is the authenticity. I can tell where it came from and whether or not it was genuine and honest.
That is exactly what I aspire the stories to be. That they feel urgent in their need to be told. That there’s a well-founded intention. That the intention I’m building is clear to me, if not anyone else.
Angelina Jolie, talking about what’s most important to her in filmmaking, said, “It’s about the message for me. It’s not about the idea of making a story. It’s not about being able to say I made a film. It’s about what it’s about and what it means.”
When you’re telling a real person’s story, that responsibility becomes even heavier. The director of The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum said, “You have to focus on what’s important. What’s the story you wanna tell, which is important to me as a filmmaker. And then there’s the objective story which is the true story of this man, these two things will always crash and drag. But you have a responsibility to do justice to somebody who’s lived.”
And maybe that’s what filmmaking really is, a constant negotiation between truth and perspective.
And sometimes, the intention is not to give answers at all, but simply to create space. The director of A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow, after the film came out, said, “What’s interesting is that there’s a conversation. Whether it’s antagonistic or productive, there’s a conversation. And that was the intention of the film.”
In that sense, filmmaking becomes less about what is shown and more about what is meant. Less about the surface and more about what drives it. Because in the end, what the audience remembers isn’t just what they saw. It’s what they felt. Just like how even memory works. You sometimes don’t remember your most favourite memory or what someone or you said in that moment, but what you do remember is how you felt.
And what audiences feel comes from something invisible, something that cannot be framed, lit, or edited into existence.
It comes from intention.
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