Meet Vir Srinivas | Filmmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Vir Srinivas and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Vir, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
Any career can be creative. I didn’t choose to be a filmmaker over something else because it was ‘artistic’. A lawyer can turn his vocation into a fine art, while a director can be completely bereft of imagination. I’m probably better at film than anything else, and fortunately, it also happens to be one of my greatest passion.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am most proud of my debut feature film, “Orders from Above”. It was my first film, shot it on a piece of junk with one lens during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns. It went on to win awards and was distributed on several streaming platforms. Since then, I’ve made a couple of shorts and written a few screenplays. Each is special in its own way and none of them were easy. I think what separates myself from other filmmakers today is that I am willing to dive deep into the past to find the films of the highest quality and learn from them. So few films today are sincere. In recent years, if we’re lucky, only one or two come out which are actually sincere. Last year, it was “Air”, and this year, it is “Knox Goes Away”.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
If a friend were visiting me for a week in my hometown of Sydney, Australia, I would suggest the following itinerary:

Day 1 – Sydney Opera House
Day 2 – Ritz Cinemas
Day 3 – Sydney Theatre Company
Day 4 – Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace
Day 5 – State Theatre
Day 6 – Golden Age Cinema & Bar
Day 7 – Sydney Opera House

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I want to shoutout the great directors of the past, the old masters who established cinema as a supreme art form.

These include, but are not limited to Chaplin, Keaton, Gance, Lang, Hawks, Capra, Hitchcock, Huston, De Sica, Curtiz, Lubitsch, Powell and Pressburger, Wilder, Lean, Reed, Zinnemann, Fellini, Kurosawa, Ford, Bresson, Lumet, Satyajit Ray, Wyler, Kramer, John Sturges, Peckinpah, Kubrick, Costa-Gavras, Pontecorvo, Bondarchuk, Leone, Kobayashi, Melville, Richard Attenborough, Schaffner, Friedkin, Cimino, Frankenheimer, Demme, and Forman.

Website: https://www.virsrinivas.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/virsrinivas

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VirSrinivas