Interest, Not Passion: A Case Against Romanticizing Filmmaking

I've spent five years inside the Nepali film industry, as an editor, an art director, and eventually a director and VFX supervisor. Long enough to see past the part people fall in love with and into the part that actually runs the machine. And the conclusion I've landed on goes against how most people in this industry talk about their craft: filmmaking should not be a passion. It should be an interest. Maybe a belief. Not a passion.

The distinction matters more than it sounds.

A passion, the way most people use the word, is something you anchor yourself to. Your identity bends around it. Your sense of meaning runs through it. That kind of weight needs to rest on something real, something that gives you actual feedback about the world, not a constructed one. Film, even at its most "based on a true story," is fine-tuned. Reshaped. Given an arc reality never agreed to. The emotional truth might be real, but the structure around it is built, edited, paced, scored to manufacture a feeling. That's the craft, and it's a real skill. But it is not reality, and you cannot build your sense of meaning on something engineered to move you on purpose.

This is why I treat filmmaking as an interest rather than a passion. Interest implies engagement, skill, even love for the craft, without asking it to carry the full weight of who I am. My passion lives where the feedback is real: in the gym, where the numbers don't lie about whether the work happened. In language preservation, where a Newari or Tamang voice model either captures something true about a dying tongue or it doesn't. In a product, where it either solves a problem for someone or it sits unused. Those things answer back. A finished film mostly just gets interpreted.

There's an obvious question people ask once they hear this from someone who calls himself Batman: a fictional character, by definition, the most artificial possible identity to choose. Isn't that a contradiction?

It isn't, and the reason is the whole point. Batman isn't a passion of mine, he's a reference point. Out of every story ever told, he's the rare character built entirely on the premise that there are no shortcuts; no powers, no chosen-one mythology, just obsessive training, engineering, and discipline applied against a real problem. The mask is fiction. The method underneath it isn't. I didn't take the name because I love the story. I took it because the story happens to describe a real-world operating principle I already believed in before I ever framed it this way: build the capability yourself, in the real world, and the rest follows. That's an interest in a symbol, not a passion for a fiction.

So when I work on a film, I bring full craft and full attention to it, the same way Bruce Wayne brings full attention to a fight. But I don't ask the film to tell me who I am. That job belongs to the things that can't be edited after the fact.