🔦 Creator Spotlight: Vivek Anchalia
Amazing Indian Stories: Creative Liberation in the Age of AI
Indian cinema has always been my deepest creative love. I grew up on Bollywood movies, fought to get Indian cinema properly included in NYU’s film curriculum (it still shocks me that any film school can teach global cinematic history without including India), and moved to Mumbai after graduating to fulfill my childhood dream of working on Indian sets. The Bollywood films of the 90s remain my most formative artistic influence, and I travel as far as I need to catch new ones in LA and sob senselessly with a theater of others doing the same. It’s the most Indian thing about me.
So when I saw writer-director Vivek Anchalia, who understands and has built a career inside classic Bollywood now directing India’s first fully AI-generated feature film, I had to learn more. Vivek co-wrote Netflix’s Rajma Chawal, directed the feature Tikdam for JioStar, and founded Amazing Indian Stories, a studio pioneering new ways for Indian artists to create and own original IP with generative tools.
Vivek sees AI as a way to democratize access for storytellers across India who have long been shut out of the big-budget studio system. He believes the technology can expand storytelling possibilities unlike ever before while protecting the cultural specificity that makes Indian cinema so vital to so many.
This article presents excerpts from our longer conversation. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. For the full discussion:
📺 Watch the full conversation on YouTube or 🎧 Listen on Spotify
Vivek Anchalia: The reel before the feature
🎬 Democratizing Filmmaking: Vivek believes “there are more film scripts in our laptops than there are out there, and good ones. Suddenly, nobody needs permission to tell a story.”
🎥 Training Models on India: Vivek highlights the challenges AI models face in reflecting India’s cultural diversity, from faces and languages to visual textures and storytelling traditions.
🔥 Protecting the Human Core: “Writing is still completely mine. ChatGPT can mimic my style a bit, but it will never capture the mood I’m in that day, the fight I had in the morning, or something my seven-year-old just said.”
🌏 India’s Creative Edge: “In the US, AI is making films cheaper. In India, it’s letting us tell stories that were never possible to make. We aren’t competing with James Cameron…there is no comparison because these stories have not been told in that way, at that scale. So I believe a lot of countries and a lot of different languages are going to have that advantage at this point.”
Interview Excerpts
Siddhi: What first pulled you into cinema? Was there a defining moment that made you want to be a storyteller?
Vivek: I remember my childhood very clearly, especially watching television. There was a sense of where a story would go. I was famous in my family for being able to predict things that would happen 50 episodes down the line. I think there was a natural understanding of how stories work and what would be the most surprising thing to happen. I didn’t have that dream of becoming a film director. My life has been more about elimination than pursuing a goal. I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just kept rejecting things and through that rejection I landed here.
AI as a Collaborator
Siddhi: What excites you about AI as a creative partner?
Vivek: When I was doing traditional filmmaking, my film was only possible if many people agreed to do it, whether a studio, an actor, or a cinematographer. Unlike other artists, a painter doesn’t need permission to paint. A novelist doesn’t need permission to write a novel. But a director does because it brings all the art forms together and needs money and resources. Many directors and writers with great stories haven’t been able to make their films.
When I was pitching for my next film after Tikdam, it was a long journey, pitching a film and getting people on board. I was sitting at home a lot of the time. I asked, why am I wasting this time? I had already started working with AI. I realized I have too many stories to tell and I will not be able to make all of them live. It’s not one or the other. I’m still pitching my live films, but at the same time, there are stories I can tell with AI too. So why not?
Siddhi: Tell me about that first moment AI entered your process in a tangible way.
Vivek: It's a very interesting thing because when I started using AI, it was for a live action project, a feature film I was pitching, a sports drama. I wanted to make the pitch deck in a very specific manner. I wanted a consistent character that I could then take through the story and the phases of his life. I did not have the money to make it. I went on YouTube, learned how Midjourney works. I started creating, and it was 16 hours straight on the computer, and I had a deck at the end of it. The feeling was incredible. Between a thought and the entire execution, there are so many layers; so many things you have to do. You brief people, take something back, give feedback. With AI, I'm typing and it's happening. It's almost like magic the first time you do it because I'd never had this happen. This was the first time I felt there's nobody between me and the vision…as a director I always felt there was somebody in between me and the final output. For the first time as a director, I feel extremely empowered; my vision is right there in front of me.
Siddhi: You’ve described your evolving VoiceStack. What does that look like?
Vivek: It keeps changing every week because the technology is evolving so fast, there are so many players, and we're still at a nascent stage. But the principles of storytelling are still the same, which is what I rely on. Even when I was shooting live action, it was ideation, a shot breakdown, a storyboard, and then shooting that video. A similar thing happens in video. Many techniques we use are regular filmmaking techniques. I still do a voiceover just to get the feel, put it on the timeline. In my feature film, there are six songs done exactly how we would do songs for a live film. The lyrics are written by me, and there are music directors (Daniel B George and Ujwal Kashyap). I felt that AI music is very good if you're looking for a vibe for an ad film, but if you want storytelling to happen through it, it's not there yet. It’s not as deliberate as I want it to be. And when it comes to background score, it's like a symphony. You know where your scene is going, and you want the music to build that for you. A prompt right now isn't able to do it. So a lot of my audio is still traditional, and my video is AI, that's where I am.
Siddhi: If I had a camera over your shoulder while you were making Naisha, what would I see?
Vivek: You would see me banging my head! Having spoken about all the possibilities that AI brings and all the freedom and liberation it gives you, it is still ridiculously difficult to put a narrative together right now. AI is not 100% specific about giving you exactly what you want. It will get you close, but it will never give you exactly what you want. So I think this is a time when filmmakers will have to sit in the chair in front of the laptop. It's not about just getting some artists in a room and getting it done. That won't happen. Creators will have to meet tech midway. It can't be that the creator tells the tech guys what they want and then they'll get it. It won't happen. You will have to get your hands dirty and make your own movie with your own hands.
Protecting the Human Core of Storytelling
Siddhi: What’s your Creative Firewall™, the part of your process that stays fully human?
Vivek: I think writing... because many writer-directors can only write in their voice. I can train ChatGPT to try and mimic my voice a bit, but it is never truly there. What people probably don't realize is that your writing is also your mood on that day. ChatGPT's mood is the same every day. Writing becomes organic because of what happened to you that day, maybe you had a fight in the morning or a great conversation with a friend. Accidents spill into your writing. What your week, month, or year has been like…all that defines how you write.I have a seven-year-old. He does things and I put them in my scripts. ChatGPT wouldn't be able to do that. It can imagine something like that, but it won't be able to capture it.
Especially when writers and writer-directors are working, they can feel when it's off, when it's not their voice. You’re always trying to bring it into your voice, even if it is written by someone else. To me, writing is still something I do almost exclusively myself. I sometimes go to ChatGPT just to expand on ideas, brainstorm, but I've realized whatever it gives me, I come back and type everything myself. So writing is something that I think is absolutely human, and music we are still doing the usual way because that also feels very personal, and since I am a lyricist, that also is my voice.
India's Unique Advantage in the AI Era
Siddhi: You’ve said India has a unique advantage right now. What do you mean by that?
Vivek: I believe this is the first time India has a huge advantage over the US. Many countries have an advantage over America at this point, and I'll tell you why. What the US always had was the advantage of language; English was the language of the world. That's why you could raise money to make an Avatar and reach a level where the VFX was phenomenal and the films looked great. Today, what AI is doing in the US market is just making it cheaper to do the same films, because visual excellence is already at some level achieved across all your films. But in India, we've never had that. We didn't have a market big enough to tell our stories. Who could even make a thousand-crore film? It was not possible, because we would not be able to get the money back. But if that number comes down, then we have far more stories to tell than, say, someone dealing with English language. Today, AI artists making content in English are still competing with James Cameron. They are still competing with the Spielbergs of the world. Whereas when I am sitting in India and if I want to make a story about, let's say, Maharana Pratap from Rajasthan, there is no comparison because that story has not been told in that way, at that scale. So I believe that a lot of countries and a lot of different languages are going to have that advantage at this point, and I think it's going to get very, very interesting very soon.
Challenges of Training AI on Indian Content
Siddhi: What are a few areas that you think AI hasn't caught up yet that are intrinsic to Indian cinema and storytelling that it needs to?
Vivek: There's a lot of material being put into LLMs that I think is Western material. Initially, it was extremely difficult to create Indian faces, but I think that is getting fixed now, though not to an extent where all Indian images are as good as Western images. For example, the lighting is not great because the data fed is from Western films. That data is greater, richer data in terms of cinematic lighting, compositions, and everything. Here, I don't think those processes have been done. So that is why the difference in quality exists. But at the same time, I think it's just a matter of time because the big tech companies are based in the US. I think there is a little bit of an advantage there.
I think what has happened in India is all these filmmakers have a very, very original voice. That's why Indian films look very different from whatever gets made across the world. So I don't think it is going to be possible to standardize India's content making that way. Because if you look at South Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, they have very different grammar. If you go to Bihar, it has a very different grammar. Bollywood has an extremely different grammar. Within Bollywood, there are multiple ways a story gets told. Then you have filmmakers who are doing beautiful indie films that go to festivals, which are more about everyday lives of people in India. So I will find it very difficult to put even 30 Indian films in one bracket and say these are the same kind of films. So I think it is going to be a very difficult task to train any LLM on India, because I think that we are a very unique country. We have multiple religions, multiple languages, multiple cultures. We don't even wear the same clothes; 100 kilometers away, everything changes. So how do you train anything for something like that? It’s a very difficult thing to get trained on. But I also think that that gives us a lot of advantage in terms of how many different stories can come out of India. Very, very different stories are going to come out in the next two years because of AI. We'll be surprised. I can see a lot of things coming out now and I still know I'm going to be surprised by what's going to come out next.
The Future
Siddhi: What do you hope your own work points toward in the next 10–15 years?
Vivek: The honest answer is I don't know. As I said, I didn't have a goal when I started. It wasn't like if I reach there, then I'm successful. I am just moving. I'm just flowing wherever it's taking me. I feel that if I'm somehow able to stay curious and if, 20 years down the line, you can look at my career and say, 'this guy was really curious throughout the way, he never became obsolete or irrelevant, and kept accepting what came and kept adapting,' that would be success to me.
Vivek Anchalia is modeling what happens when storytellers refuse to wait for permission. He’s showing an entire generation of Indian storytellers that the tools are finally catching up to their imagination, and that stories core to the country’s cultural DNA that once sat gathering dust on laptops and notebooks might finally come alive.
As Vivek puts it, this moment really isn’t just about technology:
“Call it freedom. Call it liberation. This is finally our time.”
✉️ Inspired by a future where diverse cultural stories are told without permission? Share Vivek’s insights with someone who’d resonate and subscribe to follow along to artists shaping this new era of creative expression.