In India, you don’t just quit your paying job to become a film maker…unless you’re a madman like Amit Tripuraneni. Much to his families shock, he threw away his IT career to move to NZ to study film at South Seas film school. A couple of years later he’s releasing his first feature, a thriller set in NZ called Memories of Tomorrow. And he's being descrbed as "the next rising star to come out of the low budget trenches". Memories is an eeire film about a man who can’t remember his past - only hints of it through nightmares - and his wife who avoids it entrirely, until Roger - a ,am from the past with a mysterious agenda, brings it all back. It took just 20 days to film over a five month period and will be screened at the Asian film festival in May. Amit tells JET how he made his film with lots of love and very little cash.

How did you fund this film?
I won a bet against my uncle in India, that wasn’t for much money so I went back to him and said forget about the bet, will you give me more money and I’ll give you 25% of profits. As the film progressed the director of photography and me put in money from our own pockets.

How do you write a screenplay?
I don’t know! My process was I wrote a story first so I knew basically what it was about. I chalked out the three characters. I gave them their background and their history and put them in different situations and worked out how they’d react. Once I knew how the characters behaved, it started forming into storylines that connected and I kept on writing. I also thought if I was sitting in the theatre, would I like to see this?

Was coming up with an ending difficult?
We didn’t actually have an ending. I wrote it but I didn’t shoot it. The ending needed to have an emotion, not a story point. I wanted the audience to feel for the characters and trying to write it into a scene wasn’t working out. So we experimented in post production in January.

So if the actors weren’t around, how did you get an ending?
Since we were shooting over the weekends there were times when not all cast or crew members were available so we’d simply go out and shoot random stuff.

We’d play around with certain themes. So one weekend we’d try to capture loneliness for example. It worked. Since we had no pressure from crew members, we’d just take it easy and wait for the right moment. In post production, we looked at what we could use.

What did you learn from this process?
If you have a passion, keep following it. Otherwise you’ll never know if you were right about it.

What’s a big philosophy you work by?
My belief is, don’t tell the audience the story, you show them and let them figure out what’s happening. Body language and space is very important.

Would you ever want to work in Bollywood?
No. film making is about the process not the product. In Bollywood you don’t get any technical freedom because they’re all set to a formula. You need dance and song sequences. It’s about the product.

Favourite film?
An animated film by Mamoru Oshii called Ghost in the Shell.