Soman Chainani
Novelist and screenwriter; author of The School for Good and Evil
This professor was obviously on the jury, and I wanted to stay the faculty’s blessed son, and so I trusted external validation at this point in my life more than my own creative compass. So, like a lemming, I followed his advice. I spent the whole night undoing eight months’ work and recutting the film. And the next day, I presented this hacked up Frankenstein to the faculty, who absolutely demolished it.