I'm telling the same story in every film.
You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
Competition between men is a fuel that's useful to us. We have to be careful that it doesn't tell the same story over too many times, but it's amazing how durable that story is.
Every love story or Hindi film has the same story, but what makes it different is the treatment it's given. Much depends on how it is stylised, how the characters are moulded, and how the story is treated.
The same myths are told in every culture, and they might swap out details, but it's still the same story. It's the same story, but with a different face.
Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.
My family is no different from yours. We may be different from the geography that we come from. Some of you all may pray differently than I do, some of you all may be from a different ethnicity, but we all have the same story.
I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.
Because you're telling a story, and I'm sure people fifty years ago would tell the same story differently if they were telling it to you today. Because the time is different. The film is the work of today's audience.
