How Originality Shapes Art: Making Stories Only You Can Tell

What's the movie that we have never seen because  you haven't made it? And make that movie. Years ago, when I first heard this, I took  it as a challenge. Like Tarantino was saying:   go make something the world's never seen before.  Something bold. Something completely original.

And for a long time, that's what I chased. I believed that true artistry was about  being a visionary, about originality. But over time, that interpretation  started to fall apart.

You soon realize that every  story's already been told.   There are only a handful of basic plots and so on. But if originality wasn't the key,  

then what was my role as an artist?  What made anything I created worth it? This question stuck with me.  And it sent me searching. That's when something came to mind.

This is Für Elise by Beethoven.  You've definitely heard it before maybe in a music class, maybe in an elevator.  But there's this interesting thing about it. This melody feels kind of inevitable,  

like it always existed, and Ludwig van  just happened to be the one to catch it. And I had this thought: if he hadn't written  it, maybe someone else eventually would have.   Could another composer have come  up with the same tune? Probably.

But it would have sounded different. It would  have carried a different emotional weight,   because the person behind it—whoever they  were—would have brought their own interpretation. And that's when something clicked. Maybe  ideas, themes, stories—they already exist.

But what turns them into art  is how you interpret them. How you frame them, feel them, structure them. Let me show you what I mean. Take the film Gravity. On the surface, it's a  space movie. But it didn’t really start that way.

Alfonso Cuarón had been working on a  personal, intimate arthouse project. It fell apart. No financing, no backup  plan, and suddenly he was broke. "I told Jonás, ‘I need to write something  right now. But no, no arty sh*t.

I need to write something that  can be appealable for a studio,   just to pay a check now, for me to keep on going.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but if you're going to do it,  

it has to be something that is relevant to you.’  And says, ‘Okay, what do you feel right now?’ ‘I just feel I have to go through all these stuff.  I just want to put my feet back on the earth.’ And he says, ‘There you go.’

‘And meanwhile how do you feel?’ He says,   ‘I—I feel like I've fallen in the  damn void.’ Says, ‘There you go.’" Spinning. I can't breathe.

That feeling became Gravity. A survival  thriller. Sandra Bullock, lost in space,   spinning out of control, trying  to come back down to Earth. And thanks to him, we started structuring  the whole thing. And he says, you see,  

at the end maybe you do a personal film. He didn’t write about being broke. He didn’t write  about depression. He wrote what it 'felt like'. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver,  Raging Bull, and First Reformed,

has this way of talking about  writing that feels more like therapy. You begin with yourself. You are the raw material. He gives his students this exercise: write down  your biggest personal problem. Not a plot idea.  

Not a character. Just the thing you're carrying.  Then ask yourself: what's the metaphor for that? Because that's the thing  about powerful storytelling. It's not the literal story that hits you.

It's the feeling underneath it,  translated into something new. For example: someone who's hiding their  sexuality, who spends their life hiding   who they are—that doesn’t have to turn into a  coming out story. It could become a spy thriller.

Because being closeted can feel like being  undercover. Always scanning the room. Always keeping track of what  version of yourself is safe to show.   Even the people who love you don’t fully know you.

It’s not the literal story. It’s  your experience disguised as a story.   Because you're actually talking about the  problem without talking about the problem. That's what Paul Schrader  did with Taxi Driver too.

He was broke, alone, disconnected from the world. And then it clicked. He was already  living the metaphor. A man in a taxi,   surrounded by people yet completely  alone, watching life through a windshield.

That became Travis Bickle. "I mean, I—I wrote the script essentially  for myself, as—as therapy. And so,   uh, it was something—I was surprised the degree to  

which a large number of people  plugged into my own neurosis." So the story might be familiar. But how you  see it—that’s the part no one else can do. Because here’s the thing:  there are only so many plots.

But if your problem is real,  and your metaphor is honest,   those old stories come alive again—poured  through you like new wine in old bottles. So maybe it isn't about finding this genius,  once-in-a-lifetime idea. But rather tuning  

into what already exists—around you or inside  you—and expressing it in a way only you could. But interpretation doesn't always  start with personal pain or metaphor. Sometimes it starts with someone  else's story—and what you do with it.

Take Oldboy, for example. It was based on  a Japanese manga, which was itself loosely   inspired by Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.  But Park Chan-wook didn't just adapt it. He completely reinterpreted  it through his own lens. 

He kept the premise: a man mysteriously imprisoned for years,  then released and told to figure out why.  But then he flipped the question—not why  was he locked up, but why was he let go?

The story became a modern Greek  tragedy, filled with taboo, guilt,   and emotional punishment. None of that was  in the manga. It came from Park—his vision,   his obsessions, his culture,  his own unique filmmaking style.

That's interpretation. And speaking of applying your own  style of filmmaking—let's look at   a filmmaker who didn’t just reinterpret a  story. He changed what a genre could be.

Sergio Leone took Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and  reimagined it as A Fistful of Dollars.   He didn’t copy it. He transformed  it—creating the Spaghetti Western. This wasn’t a regular western. He  slowed the pacing. Cut scenes to music.

Used silence like tension. Framed shots like Leone. Leone made western heroes dangerous and  sexy in a way they had never been before.

Before him, westerns were about  noble cowboys and clear morality. His west was gritty, lawless, ambiguous.  Survival mattered more than virtue. And in doing so, he created an entirely new genre.

It wasn’t a new story. It was a new language. But sometimes, the genre stays the same—and it’s  the personal story inside that makes it powerful. Like a movie about aliens—something  we’ve seen a hundred times—can feel  

completely original when it’s  filtered through someone’s life. "The whole movie, for me, grew  out of growing up in South Africa,   and sort of—my experiences growing up as a kid  are reflected very accurately in the film."

Neill Blomkamp grew up in  apartheid-era Johannesburg. And when he made his first feature, he didn’t  write a historical drama or a documentary. He made a science fiction film  about aliens forced into slums.

But it wasn’t really about aliens. It was about  what it felt like to live inside segregation. To grow up in a system built on  categories, fences, and forced removals. And by telling it that way,  

he turned his experience into something  that we could universally understand. He took something massive—sci-fi—and used it  to say something deeply personal and political. He didn’t show the problem directly.

He interpreted it. That’s why District 9 landed so hard. Now compare that to his later movies.

They had bigger budgets, more visual  effects, but they didn’t land the same way. Maybe because they started from  concept, not from something lived. They didn’t carry the same personal weight. They  didn’t feel interpreted. They felt designed.

One was born from personal  experience. The others—from concept. So whether it starts with a metaphor, a feeling,   or a genre you grew up loving—what matters  is that it’s honest. And that it’s yours.

Maybe that’s what Tarantino meant all along. Make the version of the story that only you can. Good, bad, or indifferent, Reservoir  Dogs didn’t really exist before I did it.

Heist films had been made. Hong Kong movie City on Fire, if  you’ve ever seen City on Fire,   it’s very, very different from my movie.

The section that they say I took—I did take  from it, all right? Absolutely I took from it. But it’s a very different movie. They actually talked to the  director, Ringo Lam, and he goes,  

“Wow, Tarantino took the last 10 minutes of  my movie and made an entire movie about it.” You know, there was Barry Levinson and Tin Men,   and there was Goodfellas, and there was  all kinds—there was the David Mamet stuff.  

All that stuff existed that was sort of like  Reservoir Dogs—but it wasn’t Reservoir Dogs. It didn’t have this aesthetic that I’d  been having. It was never just there. I mean, if it was just there—if two  or three other people were doing it—I  

might not have been the filmmaker, because  I didn’t need to get it out of my head. So maybe it’s not about  chasing the next great idea or inventing something no one’s ever thought of.

Maybe it’s about making something no one else  could have made—because it came through you.