Start With a Point of View, Not a Cause: How R. Balki Finds the Film Inside a Social Issue

Every few weeks, a writer tells me: "I want to make a film on dowry." Or on farmers. Or on mental health.

I always ask the same thing back: "Okay. What do you think about it that nobody else is saying?"

Usually there's a long pause. Because a cause is not a story. A cause is a topic. What turns it into a film is a point of view.

A filmmaker who doesn't start with the issue

R. Balki is a good person to learn this from. Before films, he spent years in advertising and went on to chair Lowe Lintas in India. Then he wrote and directed Cheeni Kum, Paa, Pad Man, Chup and Ghoomer.

Pad Man (2018), which he co-wrote with Swanand Kirkire, is about menstrual hygiene. Paa (2009) is about a boy with a rare ageing disorder. On paper, both look like "issue films".

But in a recent masterclass, Balki said something I wish every new writer heard early: he never starts with the social issue. He starts with a point of view, and the issue becomes the excuse for it.

What that looks like in practice

He told two origin stories in that talk.

Paa began with a casting thought, not a message: the idea of Amitabh Bachchan playing his real-life son Abhishek's son. That reversal was the hook. The story grew around it.

Pad Man began with a conversation with Arunachalam Muruganantham, the Coimbatore entrepreneur whose life the film is based on. Balki recalled him making a simple point: a sanitary pad is about hygiene, so why do the ads show women leaping over white fences? That observation, a little funny and a little angry, became the film's way in.

In both cases, the starting point was a specific way of seeing. Not "this issue is important".

Why a point of view works better than a cause

A cause makes you preach. When you start with "people must know about this", every scene turns into a lecture. The audience feels it within minutes.

A point of view makes you curious. When you start with "here's what I find strange, funny or unfair about this", you have a voice. The audience follows a voice.

A point of view gives you scenes. "Women's health matters" gives you nothing to shoot. "Why do ads show women jumping fences?" gives you a man in a village asking a question nobody around him wants to hear. That's a scene.

In advertising, we call this finding the insight. The product was never the idea. The idea was the insight into how people actually behave. Balki's films feel like they come from the same habit.

How to find your point of view

Take the issue you want to write about. Then answer these three, honestly:

1. What annoys me about how this is usually talked about?

2. What have I seen with my own eyes that doesn't fit the usual version?

3. What's funny, odd or contradictory about it?

One of these will give you a sentence that sounds like you, not like a newspaper editorial. That sentence is your point of view. Build the story from there.

Try this

Write down one social issue you care about. Under it, write the usual line people say about it.

Now write the line only you would say. Keep rewriting until it surprises you a little.

That's where your film starts.

Finding your voice inside a big subject is something we work on in The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.

Got an issue you want to write about? Tell me on WhatsApp and I'll ask you the three questions.

Related reading:

• Breaking the Mould: How Writers Can Move Beyond Stereotypes

• Writing Fiction Based on True Events

• What Is a Story?