We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anjini Taneja Azhar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Anjini Taneja thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I did not go to film school. I am a visual learner, a hands on learner, a learner who often has to do things the hard way. Learning the craft is of the utmost importance. This is our very currency; our craft is how the value of our currency increases throughout our careers. As a writer, the currency is a finished script. As a director, the currency is a finish film. When deciding to pursue cinema as a career, I made a deal with myself; everything I create would not strive to be ‘better’ than the other, it would have to be ‘different.’ Different is growth, it is new, it is the sign of the craft being understood and stretched. Striving for ‘different’ rather than ‘better’ instigates trying new things, pushing myself to do things I’d otherwise be intimidated by, seeing the world in news ways and incorporating it in my work. My grandfather was the first person who told me the phrase, ‘jack of all trades and a master of none.’ I want to be a master of mine, and a master in anything is always learning, always growing. You can never know enough and never be the best. The best does not exist, neither does the limit. That is the beauty of art, especially an art form such as cinema.
Learning the craft, as fore-mentioned for me, is indulging into my obsession with film. Each day, I make sure I watch one film. I often wake up early, before the typical day begins, and watch a film with breakfast. If I cannot spare moments in my morning, I watch a film at night. In the rare occasion that I simply cannot find time in my day to watch a film, I read a screenplay. I push myself to watch every kind of film; genre, tone, language. As a young filmmaker, there are so many films that built this world that I didn’t grow up with, while our forefathers of cinema did. I ensure I watch those and study the why and the how: what made this films the pillars of art in their time? For me, learning the craft is all about feeling. When I watch a film or read a script, I identify the times in which I feel something inside. Whether it be a morose feeling, melancholy, joy, anxiety– then I identify what made me feel that way and why. The final step is learning how that scene, line, or shot was executed to make me feel that way. This not only helps me polish the craft but helps me understand who I am as a filmmaker. What visual language speaks to me? How does that affect the visual language that I speak? What makes me tick? Being authentic to ourselves and being vulnerable with ourselves is the root of any artist. This also happens to be the most rigorous and daunting part of the journey for me, so learning the craft of writing and directing for film wholly includes this. I keep a note in my phone and in a journal for films that stood out to me during my daily watch or read. Whenever I revisit this list, I realize how different and bizarre these films are. The core is character. Always character.
After this observation phase, or exploration, it’s time to practice. Learning my craft is equally ‘doing.’ I have slowly gotten comfortable with writing- always- at least a page a day of something even if not a film I plan to make. It’s important for me to look at the parts of my script that make me wince and the parts that make me proud of myself. There was a time not too long ago when I would be terrified to write on a whim or make a regular habit of it. I only wanted to write when I felt like something ‘good’ was stirring in my mind. I was setting myself up for failure. I had to watch myself write badly. I had to find the courage to hear and see what doesn’t work. And the craft cannot be learned without practicing nevertheless. It is a new practice for me to courageously write every day face the bads just as much as the goods. I’ve only found myself growing because of this.
I am learning to trust my intuition. To follow the feeling. My mother is a massive hand in my journey up this particular mountain. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “you don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” I do not write for the sake of writing, I write because there is a nagging feeling that must be expressed inside of me. Learning the discipline, the craft, is also identifying the feeling. When we write words, and I mean write with a hand and a pen, we feel things very different than we do typing on a screen. With the pressure of the ink on the page, different words invoke particular feelings; at least for me personally. When I feel like a draft of a script, whether it be a short of a feature, is nearing its polishing stages or final draft (although as my own greatest critic, perhaps no draft is ever ‘final’), I write the entire script in a notebook by hand. I use an ink pen, not a ballpoint mechanical pencil. This is a tedious, sometimes painful process, yes. However it teaches me what feels right and what doesn’t simply from the connection we have to words, a paper, and our hand. The ability to run your hands along the lines you’ve written is a way to connect with your words differently. For me, I find a lot of things I miss when typing during this part of the process. Not only this, but it teaches me patience. Patience: a critical virtue in filmmaking, and something I have always struggled with.
Anjini Taneja, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a director and screenwriter based in Los Angeles, originally from Seattle, Washington. I fell down the world of cinema like Alice did the rabbit hole, and just like for Alice, filmmaker for me is indeed a wonderland. A terrifying, wonderful, complicated wonderful. Aimlessly searching for a passion as a child, I often found myself coming up short. I wanted a purpose, even at a young age. I wanted something to light my heart on fire and keep me invested, excited about life. All I knew was that spending hours in front of my parents’ clunky dinosaur of a desktop computer with Word 2007 open, typing up stories and creating characters, felt like a warm blanket around my shoulders.
On whim, I began acting for the screen in 2011 after a talent agent in Los Angeles scouted me. From there I booked principal and lead roles in features such as JJ Abrams’ “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Young Hearts” on HBOMax, as well as TV such as Ryan Murphy’s “The New Normal” and HBO’s “The Brink.” Surrounded by visionary directing, bustling writers, and a labyrinth of light, it all clicked for me. I realized my hideaway in front of a blank page back home had a reason for being so, and a place in my future through cinema. I dove in headfirst, workshopping my craft as a director and screenwriter. Since 2015, I’ve been writing, directing, and producing. I have written and directed multiple award-winning shorts, produced for Fortune 500 companies and indie narratives, even co-written a feature for a prominent producer. In 2021, I was featured for my work in Forbes, Women Cinemakers Biennale Edition, and Ladygunn Magazine.
My most recent narrative, ‘EVERYWHERE YOU GO,’ a film I directed and co-write based on our executive producers experiences surviving the tragic 2017 Last Vegas mass shooting, follows the journey of survivor’s guilt through surrealist and experimental mediums. The film received its world premiere in-competition at the Oscar-qualifying LA Short’s Int’l Festival and will screen in-competition at Newport Beach Film Festival, as well as Bushwick Film Festival. My upcoming narrative short, “Who Are You, Nanu?’ set to shoot in India in 2024, is a WritersxWriters Finalist and Hollyshorts Screenplay Competition 2nd Place Winner. We are currently in the financing phase. I am a Golden Script Finalist and PAGE Awards Semifinalist. I dream to direct narrative features that blend dramas and thrillers. As I venture through different phases of life and growth, I explore different subjects in my films. Always character-driven, I am currently in a place of exploring stories that play with the lines between life, death, and culture. I am currently exploring emotionally-driven commercial projects as well.
I wake up each morning at 6AM to watch a film with breakfast; I hold a deep reverence for cinema, only feeling a true sense of ‘home’ writing movies, watching movies, or making movies.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I believe we exist in an era of over-saturation and a lack of romance, mystery in life as a whole. Perhaps I was born too early, or my existence in a zeitgeist like this one is a glitch in the matrix, because I haven’t quite found my place in it. Being misunderstood is the epitome of every artist, conceivably the bane of our existence, however for me it’s due to this sort of box that Gen-Z has been put in (possibly, that we haven put ourselves in). The world of art has become far too transparent in a certain manner with this ‘catered-to-social-media’ approach. We have walked ourselves to the edge of the plank, bound by the ropes that degrade cinema down to words like ‘content’ and define quality by the outcome of an algorithm. Efficiency and convenience has transformed the magic of a 30-foot screen transporting us elsewhere to a five-inch one that forces us to stay grounded in reality when cinema’s very purpose is to escape. Embracing this is not something I have found myself able to do yet, however as Gen-Z filmmaker I am expected to and am even spoken to in the language of social media and ‘content-making.’ I prefer a more analog approach in my work and in ‘how’ I create my work, however it’s a battle to fight for this in a generation when many of us are forward thinking rather than glancing at the past over our shoulder like myself. I mustn’t come off as bitter towards the undeniable advantage of access to those who need it most in the arts that have come with technological advances and social media. I just know that when I step into a room to pitch a project, or pitch my approach to directing a story, I am immediately thrown trends on Twitter or methods of appeasing the algorithm on Instagram, even how my method will give influencers something to bite when marketing the film.
My yearning for eliminating the dominance of social media, AI, and the gunk that has watered down human expression is often seen as recluse or ‘not with the times.’ The fact of the matter is, we are drawn to what we don’t know; we know too much which is why so little captures our attention these days for a long period of time. There was this mystery to life, an unknowing, that drove our curiosity up the wall. Cinema was mysterious, as were the people in it, and that’s what gave off the romance of it all. This itch to stomp on curiosity and mystery to have everything at our fingertips the moment we want it, is an injury to the creative ecosystem.
I urge society to allow the arena of cinema to widen once more. That we bring back our curiosity and patience. While the ultra-digital age does not disappear, it cannot be the only way. One must not exist without the other. Balance is crucial to the lifeblood of any art, but right now we do not have a thriving ecosystem. Respect the silver screen, allow yourself excitement from it, go to the movies, put your phone away. Don’t watch movies on your phone! Don’t allow a review or clip going viral or streams to determine the success/ value of a piece of art. We do not need everything at our fingertips every second. As a society, the only way to exhume a thriving ecosystem in the world of film is to step away from the reduction of it to numbers and streams. I urge my younger counterparts to indulge in curiosity and mystery, connection beyond the one in our pockets. A thriving creative ecosystem hangs in the balance, simply because there is none. Artists must have the opportunity to create freely, navigate the world of filmmaking as if it were the wild west (because for us, it is). This means exercising and finding our voices and how to use them beyond the ultra-digital age that dictates the moneymaking side of things.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Because I began acting at such a young age, finding myself on these world-famous studio lots and blockbuster movie sets, I had exposure to the industry early. This meant as I found the end goal (directing and screenwriting) I was often the ‘youngest’ person around me or in my circle pursuing this. I began directing at age fifteen and got my first producing internship with a major company at sixteen. My first short took me to a major film festival in New York City where my fellow filmmakers also selected at that festival were all graduates of prestige film schools like USC or NYU, while I hadn’t even graduated high school yet. This arena made me believe that greatness was defined as being the ‘first’ or the ‘youngest’ rather than being the best, and my biggest enemy became time. Looking back now, this is such a funny, ridiculous thing to think and I am so grateful I unlearned this. I began waging this un-winnable war with time; it was my worst enemy and my greatest far. It likely still is my greatest fear, but nevertheless has ceased to be the enemy. Ironically, when you spend so much of your being worrying about time, that is the exact thing that you waste. I wasted so much time worrying about being the youngest to do whatever it is I hoped to accomplish, I wasn’t working smart- or correctly- to really hone in on my craft and understand my discipline. The universe works in mysterious ways, because it kept sending signs for me to just be patient! I wouldn’t listen, as I tend to be rather stubborn, so it threw so many things at me. Missed opportunities, nightmare writing jobs or coworkers from rushing into projects, and then it threw the pandemic. I was a month shy of twenty years old when the pandemic hit. I wanted to start working on pilots and features in the big leagues that year under the assumption that I knew enough. It’s another laughable thing I suppose, because compared what I know now, back then I knew absolutely nothing. But even now, I still have so much room for growth and learning. Two years were taken from me because of the pandemic (just like everyone else) and I was forced to sit down, be patient, and work on bettering myself. Each time I jump the gun, or try to, something forces me against my will to sit down. Each time I get back up, I am thankful, because I needed it.
I unlearned this idea that time should be the determining factor of success in the regard that I must do as much as I can in so little. I do not have to be the first, the youngest, I don’t have to have it all now or do it all by tomorrow. I just need to make sure every day ends with being a little better than I was when I woke up and having learned something new that I didn’t know the day before. All I have to do is practice the craft, work towards excellence, and put in the work. The rest will come.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.anjiniazharfilms.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/anjiniazhar
- Other: Upcoming film: www.nanuthefilm.com
Image Credits
Dash Kolos, Idris Erba