Meet Sarthak Hegde

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarthak Hegde. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarthak below.

Sarthak, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.

I don’t think there’s a clear rulebook for it. For me, creativity’s never been this thing that you sit down and summon – like, okay now, create. It’s more like… you’re walking somewhere, or you’re half asleep, or you’re watching something random – and a frame or an idea just hits you. That’s usually how it starts. I’ve always felt that the important part is not losing those initial sparks when they show up. You catch them early, note them down – maybe in a notebook, maybe just as a scribble in your phone – and then you let it sit.

Sometimes I revisit it after months. Sometimes it’s immediate. But I’ve realized over time that if you force it too much, you end up trying to manufacture something that feels dishonest. It becomes mechanical. And I don’t want to do mechanical work.

A lot of it is also about living life outside of just “making things.” Observing people. Being bored sometimes. Just existing. Because otherwise, you’re only ever feeding off your own recycled thoughts, which can get claustrophobic. I think creativity dies the moment you only operate within your own headspace without letting any new air in.

There’s also this weird balance – you have to stay curious but not desperate. Curious enough to stay open. Not desperate to the point where you’re forcing art just for the sake of output. And honestly, some of the best stuff comes when you’re not actively trying to make something. You’re just reacting. Instinctively.

And I think that’s what’s kept me going so far. Letting it happen. Being okay with not having control all the time. Not trying to “protect” creativity too much, because the more you try to protect it, the more fragile it becomes.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I guess if I had to put it simply, the kind of work I’m interested in sits somewhere between realism and surrealism. The reality is always there, but it’s twisted, stretched, filtered through emotion, memory, or sometimes just instinct. I’ve always been drawn to stories that aren’t afraid to be uncomfortable. To look at the mess – whether that’s identity, religion, love, family – but without spoon-feeding a stance or wrapping it up in something neat. I’m not really interested in making work that tells people what to think. I want it to sit with them, uncomfortably sometimes, and let them feel their way through it.

Green Girl is very much that; it deals with interfaith love, identity, and communal tensions, but not in a didactic way. It’s personal. It’s rooted in where I come from, but it’s also built with a surreal lens, where you don’t fully know what’s real and what’s internal. That space in between is where I like to live creatively.

At the same time, I don’t want to repeat myself. Every project has to scare me a little bit. That’s where my next feature film is going. It’s far more chaotic, more ensemble-driven. It deals with youth, trauma, power structures, and emotional collapse, but in a way that’s hyper-stylized, tonally unstable, sometimes brutal, sometimes funny. It’s not an easy film to describe, and that’s exactly why I want to make it.

With Sarthak Hegde Film, the idea is to keep building work like this, handmade, spectacular, and deeply personal. I don’t want to run a factory. I want to create work that feels lived-in, textured, where you can feel the fingerprints on every frame. The hope is to keep that space small enough to stay honest, but open enough to experiment. Cinema is just one part of it; over time, I want to expand into other forms too. As long as the work stays rooted in something real.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

If I really break it down, I think the three most important things have been:
Instinct. Adaptability. And being extremely presumptuous.

Instinct – because at the end of the day, that’s your compass. You can learn technique, you can study structure, you can analyze other people’s work, but you need that gut feeling that tells you when something feels right or when it feels fake. And the only way to sharpen that is by doing. By making things, failing at them, watching them not work, and then slowly figuring out why. You can’t theorize your way into instinct.

Adaptability – because nothing goes according to plan. Especially in filmmaking. Locations fall through, people drop out, and logistics don’t work the way you imagined. You have to be okay with reacting in the moment and trusting that sometimes the better version is the one you didn’t plan for. A lot of my work is built on reacting to what’s happening, while still keeping my vision intact by using that unpredictability as fuel instead of fighting it.

Extremely presumptuous – in the sense that you have to operate like you belong even when you technically don’t. That you have something worth saying even when no one’s asking for it. You have to be willing to make films or projects that feel way out of your league and just assume you can pull it off somehow. It’s not arrogance, it’s delusion. That delusion is necessary. You need to function from a place of: this has value because I’m making it, even when you’re not fully sure how it’ll land.

For anyone starting out: don’t rush to be “good.” Don’t get too worried about what other people are making or how fast they’re moving. Focus on building your instincts. Make a lot of things. Watch everything. Read things that have nothing to do with your field. And most importantly, understand this idea of “self”, because that’s where your work will come from eventually.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

For me, it’s always been about doubling down on what you’re naturally drawn to. You have to protect your strengths and go extremely deep into them, almost to an obsessive level. That’s where your uniqueness comes from. The more you try to balance yourself out just for the sake of being “well-rounded,” the more you risk becoming average at everything.

Of course, you can’t be completely blind to your weaknesses. But I’ve found that most weaknesses either get managed by collaborating with the right people or they slowly improve as a byproduct of you obsessing over your strengths. You get sharper at the edges when you go deep enough in one thing.

For example, when I started, I was extremely visual. My brain would always process everything as frames, compositions, light, atmosphere. But I wasn’t naturally great at structure or conventional storytelling rules. For a while, I tried to force myself into that space, reading every screenwriting book, overthinking the “right” way to build a plot, and even emulating structures that have worked. And honestly, it made the work worse. It started to feel lifeless.

Eventually, I realized that my job wasn’t to become a textbook screenwriter. My job was to figure out how to make my way of seeing the world work inside a narrative, even if that meant breaking structure, or writing visually, or letting instinct lead the way. Once I leaned into that, the work started to breathe again.

So for me, the advice would be: sharpen what’s already sharp. That’s what people will feel when they experience your work. The gaps will either close over time, or they won’t matter as much as you think.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarthakhegdefilm/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRwbiDPY-ZMhTTJtHivPMhA

Image Credits

Abhinay Pandit, Arfan Ahmed, Nikhilesh, Hrishikesh Shankar