Filmmaking, to me, often feels like going to war... the sheer intensity and unpredictability of it all. Even after all the preparation and planning, and hard work, so many things can go wrong. And they so often do. Weather shifts. Gear breaks. Emotions run high. The schedule collapses. As you move a small army towards a common goal—one that exists mostly in your imagination, sometimes, just once in a while, a little bit of magic happens. Unplanned. Random. Spontaneous. Defying logic. 

When I look back at why I love making films and what gives me the most joy, this is what I keep coming back to. Happy Accidents. Filmmaking, at its heart, is a balance between control and chaos. We plan, we storyboard, we rehearse—yet some of the most powerful moments on set come from what we could never predict: the happy accidents.

When an actor suddenly does something you hadn’t thought of, when the stylist mixes yellow and purple and it looks stunning on camera, when the music director creates a piece that changes the mood of the scene for the better, the unexpected glance, a sudden change in light, the forgotten line.  It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. They end up breathing life into the film in ways no script ever could.

Paul Schrader never wrote the legendary ‘Are you talking to me?’ monologue in Taxi Driver.  Robert De Niro improvised it. He had watched Bruce Springsteen say it onstage when fans were screaming his name in a concert, and decided to try it in front of the mirror. Happy accident.

These accidents often remind us why we tell stories in the first place—to capture something real, raw, and human.

Happy accidents teach us humility. They remind us that no matter how much we plan, we’re not in full control—and that’s okay. They remind us that no single person... not the director, nor the actor or the editor... absolutely no one owns the magic of a film. It emerges from a thousand moving parts, often outside our grasp.

While I try to be well prepared when I’m making films, I hope to leave a little space for happy accidents. So that my films can have that little bit of pure cinema that came out of nowhere.

The author is founder and director, Oink Films, has been directing commercials for over a decade now. She directed her first feature-length film ‘Do Aur Do Pyaar’, which released in 2024. This column first appeared in our June issue, buy the copy here.