Syed Mohammed Ahmed is one of those names whose presence in Pakistan’s film industry is felt both on and off screen, with both acting and screenwriting credits on major projects throughout his long career.
But he says he’s no longer interested in doing the latter after studios and production companies keep changing his work to reflect their vision and the industry has gotten comfortable with letting his contemporaries churn out scripts using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Speaking to Sheeba Khan on her podcast Dareecha, Ahmed said there were good writers out there who wrote decent scripts, only for producers to mangle their work in the pursuit of virality.
“Sarah Majeed is a good writer. She’s young, she has a knack for fun writing, but who are the ones getting this writing done, what do they do? They twist [writers’] arms. My own serial, that I’d written 17 episodes of, did they not ask me to delete everything past episode 11?”
He said screenwriters had no say in what they wrote and things were instead dictated to them.
