"It's so opaque how a film will get made. You don't know all the steps, so you take the next step that's visible"
A conversation with filmmaker Shuchi Talati
I first met Shuchi Talati in 2017 through Adrienne Weiss’s incredible workshop Directing Actors. We’ve cheered each other on since then as we’ve found our way as independent screenwriter/director/producer hybrids. Originally from India, her first feature film, Girls Will Be Girls, premiered in competition Sundance this year where it won an Audience Award and a Special Jury Award.
It’s a coming-of-age drama where both a mother and her daughter discover desire and romance at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas. The film was supported by Aide Aux Cinémas du Monde and Sørfond grants, and the screenplay was part of the Berlinale Co-Production Market, Gotham Week and Cine Qua Non Script Lab (deadline coming up on May 5th!)
We had a Zoom catch-up from opposite ends of Brooklyn, edited and condensed here:
ASK: You just made your first feature Girls Will Be Girls. You've screened it at Sundance, you've screened it at SXSW. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of people experiencing your movie?
ST: At Sundance, the young actors who play Mira and Sri [Preeti Panigrahi and Kesav Binoy Kiran] were watching the film for the first time. For them to experience the love they could feel in the room... It's not an explicit film, but it's frank about sexuality. It's a hard thing for young actors to take on in India, which is pretty conservative. It's really brave that they both took this on as their first feature film roles.
ASK: In general, the whole timeline was around eight years? I feel like that is something that a lot of people don't fully absorb when they watch a movie, especially a first feature.
ST: When I came out of film school, you hear the average is five to ten years, and you're like, I'm going to make mine in three years. Then of course that doesn't happen. I would say the first four were just me muddling through. Learning how to write, trying to figure out how to take yourself seriously. Then at some point, my Indian producer came on board and we met our French producer and another Indian partner. End of 2018 we had a producing team together and I was accountable to turn in drafts to people. It's so opaque how a film will get made. You don't know all the steps, so you take the next step that's visible, which felt like applying to grants and labs. It became real when we got the CNC funding. We got a decent amount of money, and we pitched at the Berlinale Talent Project Market in 2022. Fall of that year, we shot.
ASK: The location of the boarding school in the Himalayas feels like a character - how did you pick that particular setting?
ST: There have been other boarding school stories in Indian cinema, but they're offering these elite schools set up by missionaries. This one is a Hindu boarding school. I think most people who are not from India may not clock this, but you can tell from the architecture that it's not as posh as those other schools. In the film, every morning the kids line up in this very rigid militarized formation and they take the school pledge. The protagonist is crowned the Head Prefect, she feels safe within the rules at the beginning of the film and that begins to crumble... but it's in tandem with her sexual awakening.
ASK: The shoot itself was 36 days, which is a long shoot for an independent film.
ST: Shoots are longer in India because the crews are very big, but that was one thing I really fought for. I was like, I will give up other things as long as I can have time with the actors to get the performances right. I really knew I wanted to get gradations of their performances on set.
ASK: Sounds like such a dream. One of the things that stayed with me from your movie was the study of romance. Growing up, you learn how to kiss and how to have sex from movies. It’s this funny feedback loop where you watch a performance, and then that becomes how you perform. So many coming-of-age movies about female sexuality are so performed, taken from other on-screen performances instead of real life… even though they are meant to represent real life.
ST: Oh, my God, I think that's such a good point, how we behave in our real life and how that's affected by cinema. The things that you've been taught to do, by pop culture. That was part of the joy of making this film, as somebody who's older. Being able to be like, well, that's really not how it was. To try and bring all of these insecurities and all that messiness of actual sexual encounters, that was very important.
ASK: Sexual awakening stories are kind of your beat.
ST: When I grew up, there was so much shame around bodies and sexuality. Nothing that celebrated this part of the human experience, nothing that made it normal and mundane. Once I moved to the West, I didn’t see South Asians depicted as sexual beings almost ever. Our stories are often about explaining our culture to a white audience. All of that made me want to deal with sexuality in a way which allows us to see South Asians as sexual beings on screen and then also explore the complexity of sex, no matter what race or ethnicity the characters are. My experience of sex is that it's extremely vulnerable. I don't see that often on screen and I missed that.
ASK: I'm so curious how you and your cinematographer first started working together?
ST: Jih-E Peng shot my last short film and she's a dear friend. By coincidence, the script went to Cine Qua Non script lab and Jih-E had a script there at the same time. For two weeks, you just workshop each other's projects every day, all the time, so you get to know people's projects really intimately. We wanted this film’s visual language to be clear but never overpower the storytelling. I knew I consciously wanted to stay away from the exotic, colorful images that you see of India. She took me to the New York Public Library Picture Collection where you have all these folders stuffed with clippings loosely organized by topic. We saw hundreds of photographs, took pictures of them and created a mood board. Like, here are the images that speak to us and let's reverse engineer why.
ASK: I really wanted to talk to you about the training program that you did, UnderCurrent Lab. How did that come about? In what ways are you working within the system, but also changing it and making it better?
ST: Because this film deals with a young woman's sexuality, it made sense to have as many women on the crew as possible. We knew it would be hard in the camera and G&E departments which are so male-dominated everywhere in the world, but especially in India. Our co-producer Tanya Negi was like, maybe we should start a training program? We put together a grant application for the Berlinale Talents' Mastercard Enablement Programme and we got a little bit of seed funding, which made it suddenly real. We pitched to lighting companies in India. The way lighting companies in India work is that they not only send you the equipment, they also send you the team. So you hire the gear and the gaffer, who brings their team with them. The largest rental house Light 'n' Light was immediately on board. We put out a call for applications and there were forty applicants. Nine of them came to the training and they started interning on sets. We're raising money to do a second edition of Undercurrent Lab and to continue it beyond the first training that we did for our film.
ASK: What was your process like building a safe space for your cast?
ST: I couldn't work with an intimacy coordinator in India because there are so few of them right now. The first part of creating a safe space was during rehearsal -- this would typically be just be and the actors. We would talk about the visual language, what touch felt good and safe, and then choreograph the scene. Then I’d take photos of potential shots and run them by the actors so they’d have clarity about how they would be photographed. And then on set, when we framed up, we would take a picture of the monitor, and ask, “Is this okay for you?” One time, one of the actors asked us to reframe a shot because they were not comfortable and we did. I remember when Jih-E shot my last short film [A Period Piece, SXSW 2020], which has a lot more nudity, she offered to take her shirt off so that the actress wouldn't feel like she was the only one topless. She's really wonderful at making actors feel safe. But in general, it’s important to schedule ample time for intimate scenes so there’s space for dialogue, for changing the plan, and moving at a pace that feels comfortable.
ASK: Let’s talk about the mother/daughter relationship. That whole sense of how much you learn about sex and love and seduction from your mother, what is passed down, what is inherited trauma, the power dynamic…
ST: When I first started writing there was no mom character. It was a triangle between Mira, her boyfriend and a teacher. I so strongly identified with Mira that I don't know if I had a lot of compassion for the older woman character. Through the writing, I started to see the mom really differently. The thing that unlocked the script was realizing she is a young woman, she has a 16-year-old daughter, her life is taking care of her daughter and her husband and being in this supporting role. She's supposed to be asexual, to not want to flirt. When I was growing up in India, most of my parents' generation had kids when they were like 22, 23. I didn't ask anyone, but my guess is that a lot of the women were probably not having great sex. Of course you would feel envious if you saw your daughter or a new generation have the things that you didn't get to have. You want to give them more freedom than you had, but how can you not grieve for the youth that you didn't have? In a world that really prizes women for their youth, it just feels inevitable.
ASK: I've been thinking about this quote of Judith Butler’s: “I am inside of something, socially, culturally constructed. At the same time, I find my own way in it. And it’s always been my contention that we’re both formed and we form ourselves, and that’s a living paradox.” I felt that in Anila, who is performing her duties as a mother, as a wife but also rewriting the rules for herself. Her performance was such a tightrope act.
ST: When we were auditioning, I was like, we're looking for this live wire quality, you know? I had been a fan of Kani Kusruti’s work. She was in this short film that I saw at Sundance called Counterfeit Kunkoo, and she was stunning in it. As soon as she auditioned, I was obsessed. I kept watching and rewatching her audition and I was like, we have to get her.
ASK: Preeti Panigrahi who plays the lead Mira got the Special Jury Award at Sundance. Curious what the casting process was like for her?
ST: The casting process was long. I worked with this amazing casting director, Dilip Shankar. He’s a veteran: he's worked a lot with Mira Nair, he cast Monsoon Wedding, but he's not in Bombay where Bollywood is. He's a theater person who lives in Delhi so he has this foot in two different worlds. He's also a very fine actor and an acting teacher himself. We did a wide search and put out flyers, inviting young people to just answer a question and they would tell a story on video. Then we reached out and asked them to do an audition scene. Preeti immediately was a standout. She has this inner strength. A lot of young actresses were tempted to play coy and bat their eyelids but she was like, I'm the head prefect. I like this boy, but I have this dignity that I will not let go of.
ASK: The movie lives or dies on her shoulders in a major way.
ST: She's so close to that character, she would always come to rehearsal with her little notebook so in some ways, working with her was very easy because she really had access to this character in a special way. There were so many similarities. Once both the young actors were cast, they worked with Dilip Shankar, our casting director, to get acting lessons and expand their tool box. He does a lot of interesting embodied work. I had a week of rehearsal on location and during that time, we did some backstory scenes between Mira and Anila, her mom. I was like, Preeti, what scenes are the most challenging? She was really afraid of one dangerous scene because she said “I feel like I don't know how to do fear on screen without being over-the-top or cliche”. I think as women everywhere but especially in India, the way men sometimes look at you… There's a very violent gaze, whether it's an elevator or in a local train. You try not to show fear, but your whole body tightens and shrinks, you know? So we imagined some scenarios she worked through and I was like, you don't have to worry about showing any emotion. If you feel it, it's enough. Which is a good general rule of thumb for any screen acting.
ASK: What's going on with the movie now?
ST: I'm traveling as much as I can. It's going to have a theatrical release in the US in September, also in France.
In the meantime, Girls Will Be Girls will be playing at the following festivals:
May 13 & 15 Seattle International Film Festival
May 18 CAAMFest (San Francisco)
June 2 Berkshire Internatinal Film Festival
June 5-10 Sundance London
June 12-16 Provincetown Film Festival
June 19-24 Nantucket Film Festival