Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of directing some of the most recognised faces in our cultural landscape — Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma, Anil Kapoor, Virat Kohli, Janhvi Kapoor and Shubman Gill. What stays with me after each collaboration is not the scale or the visibility, but the quiet discipline they bring to the frame.
The first lesson is presence. Great performers don’t “try” in front of the camera — they arrive with a deep internal stillness. The energy sharpens, the noise falls away, and even a small gesture begins to carry weight. As a director, this changes your own rhythm. You prepare more. You speak less. You become extremely precise with intent, because they respond to thought, not instruction.
Celebrities live in a space where time is compressed and expectations are high. When they sense clarity — in the brief, in the visual language, in the emotional objective — the collaboration becomes fluid. The performance starts to grow in the spaces between the words. Often the most memorable moments are not designed; they happen because the environment allows them to.
What inspires me most is their work ethic. The willingness to repeat a take for a micro-shift in emotion. The awareness of light, lens, and timing. The understanding that in a 30-second film, every frame is narrative. It pushes me to refine my own process — to build systems that protect spontaneity.
These experiences have reinforced a belief I return to again and again: directing is not about commanding the frame, it is about creating the conditions for truth to appear within it. And when that happens, scale is no longer about celebrity — it becomes about presence, craft, and emotion.