This is perhaps the post I should have written first, before any of my Dear Maya posts. This is the post about raising funds. About the money. It’s the single most important ingredient in deciding the shape of your film and something we should be talking a lot more about. After an insane number of […]
One of the most interesting experiences that you go through as a writer/director when you reach out to actors is a ‘narration’. A narration is narrating the story orally to actors, instead of them reading the script themselves. I might be wrong but I think this is a purely south Asian concept. So an actor […]
After casting Manisha, casting the two girls for the parts of the naughty fifteen-year-old school girls in Shimla was where the conventional casting process and auditioning really began. Let me step back for a minute to some of the blog pieces I wrote in the ‘finding your way’ section. Knowing what kind of director you […]
After the film script is in place, the second most important decision for the director is always the casting. Mukesh Chhabra, the incredibly well known casting director but also my friend stepped in to help me find the incredible cast of Dear Maya. His support was invaluable even though I drove him quite mad. Together, […]
The first offer I got to make my feature film debut was in the middle of Rockstar, and I was beyond thrilled at the opportunity. I quickly doubled down, shared a script with the studio and things were ready to go. Unfortunately unknown to me at that time, the company was going through a hell […]
There is a LOT of hero-worshiping in the movies and I’m not talking about actors. Nearly every head of department is worshipped by his/her team…. Probably because of how hard it is, nearly everyone successful person has been given some sort of glamour and magical qualities by the rest of the aspiring world. When I […]
While we are on the topic of Rockstar, I can’t really go forward without mentioning the person who entered my life in Rockstar and stayed with me the most from my assisting days. She is one of my absolute closest, craziest and most gorgeous friends, Nargis Fakhri. And since it’s her birthday there can be […]
By the time Rockstar started, I actually knew a few things. I had already assisted on two films and rotated through the entirety of roles that an assistant can possibly perform, which meant I was no longer useless. The process of filmmaking had settled into my system, I was eager to rise up in the […]
In Love Aaj Kal, I had been moved up a little in the Assistant Director hierarchy. The work on Love Aaj Kal largely involved me setting up the background actors on set, directing the set action of everyone else apart from the lead actors. On days when we shot the flashback portions of the 60’s, […]
As a young female AD on set, I often had many surreal, out of body experiences that revolved around my gender. For the incredibly limited number of women there are on the set, it was shocking how much women occupied the topics of conversation on the 90 percent male dominated set. Women, their shape, size, […]