Surrounded by pristine walls of a boardroom after a pitch, you hear the tenth white noise of the month: "We'll get back to you". You know what it actually means: rejection. Your head goes into overdrive, a voice whispers, Maybe they're right. This is the place where most dreams are abandoned. But it is also the moment where iconic art is hammered into existence with an iron will. Because whether you listen to your lingering doubt about your worthlessness or shut it down and keep fighting, you are right.
Take Hwang Dong-hyuk. For over a decade, he tried to hustle Squid Game only for studio execs to call it “too violent,” “too bizarre,” and “too unrealistic.” They couldn't see the piercing socioeconomic allegory beneath the bright tracksuits. They saw only risk, rejected it, only for it to become the most-watched show in Netflix history.
This isn’t an anomaly; it is a pattern in the creative fields. Vince Gilligan, hawking Breaking Bad, was shown the door at HBO, Showtime, and FX. The tale of a mild-mannered chemistry teacher turning into a meth kingpin was deemed too niche, too dark, too unfamiliar. But when AMC, a network then known for classic movies, took the gamble, it turned into a 16-Emmy-winning masterpiece that reshaped television.
Back to the Future was rejected 40 times. 15-20 networks turned down the Duffer Brothers' Stranger Things, and no one wanted to touch Star Wars till Fox took a gamble.
The Anatomy of a 'No'
Why does this happen? Why do sleek, multimillion-dollar corporations, built on the backbone of storytelling, often fail to recognise brilliance? Isn’t discovering brilliance their main job requirement?
The easy answer is to call them short-sighted or stupid. The honest answer is far more complex and, ultimately, liberating. Our minds are prediction engines, honed by millennia of evolution to favour the familiar. For our prehistoric ancestors, the unknown—a new berry, a strange shadow—could mean danger and death. That primal instinct, the "lizard brain," still pulses beneath our modern suits. It screams "Danger!" at anything that lacks a direct, proven precedent.
In corporate boardrooms, this translates into a pathological aversion to risk. The operative refrain from executives becomes the creative’s curse I’ve heard numerous times: “get us something new, yet somehow familiar.” They are not villains; they are victims of their own neurology, tasked with the impossible work of betting millions on a feeling. Your idea may not have been rejected because it was bad; it may have been shown the door because it is too original, too potent, too new for a system designed to replicate past successes.
Hence, rejection is not always a verdict on quality, but a rite of passage even the best among us have to go through to prove our worth to the world, but more importantly, to ourselves.
Now the question is, how do you navigate this trial by fire without your creative soul being burnt to ashes? How do you persist when the world seems united in its indifference to you and your creation?
1. Embrace the Algebra of Persistence
Remember the words of Churchill: “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Let me give this a practical framework. Imagine yourself as a salesperson in a saree shop. Through experience, you know that for every 100 people who walk in, only ten will make a purchase. But you don’t know which ten of the hundred will. Therefore, as a master salesperson, you have learnt not to discriminate. You deliver your full, passionate pitch to the 100th customer with the same energy you put into the first.
So, if you are a filmmaker, make this your new life mantra: Pitch. Fail. Pitch Again. See rejection not as a personal failure, but as a necessary statistical event, a loyalty program if you will. You must accumulate enough "no's" to earn your "yes." Fail seven times, stand up and pitch the eighth. There is a mathematical inevitability to this process that can, strangely, be a comfort in dark times.
2. The Delicate Dance: Stubborn Vision, Malleable Craft
Creating great works of art is a dance with a tricky balance. You must be unshakably stubborn in your belief that your story must be told, while remaining fluid and humble in your craft. I have known filmmakers with objectively terrible ideas, convinced they were peddling masterpieces, their egos insulating them from the truth and growth. I have also seen geniuses with fragile spirits who gave up after the first few rejections.
The trick to filmmaking success (I’d say life), is this duality: You must be both the unyielding mountain and the flowing river. Knowing when to be which is the trick. Hold fast to your core truth – the emotional heart of your film. Is it a story of redemption? Of injustice? Of love? That is your mountain. But be willing to reshape everything else – the plot structure, a character's arc, the dialogue based upon genuine feedback. That is your river. It is a dance of conviction and adaptation, and mastering its steps is a lifetime's work.
3. The Ultimate, Liberating Truth: Nobody Cares
This is the hardest pill to swallow for any creator, but also the most empowering. No one really cares about the film you want to make. The world is not waiting for your script. It is busy, distracted, and often cynical about anything that’s not viral. You might believe your film can change a life, shift a perspective, or heal a broken heart, but you must be willing to be Sisyphus, alone in carrying the weight of that belief.
The films that get made are often not the ones with the most inherent quality, but the ones championed by creators with wills of iron – men and women who refused to take "no" for an answer, who barrelled through the world’s apathy to force their creation into existence. They are not always the most talented, but they are the most relentless. This is why there are so many bad films: they are the children of the sheer tenacity of their creators. Let your great film be one, too.
The Lonely Fire
And in that struggle, you will be alone. When you suffer such intense bouts of imposter syndrome that you feel you might crumple like paper, no one stands by you. When you walk the streets at night, the weight of your unrealised vision pressing you down, no one offers a hand. When you cry in the rain so you don’t see your own tears, no one provides a shoulder to lean on. This is the ruthless nature of art. Out of the world's most profound indifference to you, you must create something so beautiful that it makes a profound difference to them. What an irony. What a lovely, necessary struggle.
So, do not curse rejection. Do not hold a grudge against the ones who cannot see your vision.
This is not the end of your road. This is your baptism by fire. This is the cauldron where masterpieces are forged. A diamond, after all, is simply a piece of coal that has handled centuries of pressure exceptionally well. Are you that coal? Can you withstand the heat and the weight of a thousand "no's" and still cling to your truth, refining it, polishing it, until it can no longer be ignored? If you can, then to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling,
“..yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a filmmaker, my one.”
Carry on. For though the world may not be asking for your art, you know in your bones it will be a better place with it.
