The great Tamil screenwriters—from K. Balachander to Mani Ratnam, from Crazy Mohan to Vetrimaaran—understood this. They did not build plots like brick walls. They built courtyards where the story could wander, nap in the sunlight, and occasionally scratch the furniture.
When you watch Nayakan , you are not watching a plot. You are watching a cat that grew into a panther. When you watch Soodhu Kavvum , you are watching a stray that refuses to be neutered. When you watch Super Deluxe , you are watching seven cats in one house, all ignoring each other until the climax. I have written screenplays that were obedient. They had perfect structure. They followed every rule in Syd Field’s book. They were dead on arrival.
And I have written pages at 2 AM, crying with laughter or despair, while a stray thought rubbed against my ankle. Those pages? They hissed at me for weeks. But eventually, they curled up in my lap and purred.
Your screenplay is not a machine. It is a cat. It will come to you when it is ready. And when it does, it will bring a dead bird in its mouth—a strange, messy, beautiful gift that only it could catch.
“A screenplay is a cat.”
But if you have ever tried to tame a cat—or write a film—you will understand the metaphor perfectly.