Director Sujata Day on her first feature length film Definition Please, on Netflix
The best part of being a journalist is not the writing. It’s meeting different people and finding out what makes them tick. And sometimes, when you’re lucky, you get to meet and interview someone who inspires you and makes you fall in love with your job, all over again. For me, Sujata Day was one of those people. If you’re familiar with Issa Rae’s American comedy web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and HBO show Insecure then you’ll know Sujata. Witty, clever and disarmingly down-to-earth, Sujata is a powerhouse of talent as an actor, writer and director. So much so, that her first feature length film - she wrote, directed and acted in it - made waves on the film festival circuit and is now on Netflix.
Titled Definition Please, it is a comic and feel-good yet nuanced portrayal of ordinary suburban, south Asian life in America. In the film, when we meet Monica Chowdry in 2005, the eight-year-old is on top of the world as champion of Scribbs National Spelling Bee. Fast-forward to present day and grown-up Monica (Sujata’s character) is still living at home in Greensburg, Pennsylvania with her ailing mom Jaya (Anna Khaja), making a living tutoring a new crop of future overachievers while hesitating to make any big moves in her own life. Monica faces an unwelcome disruption in her mundane routine when her older brother Sonny (Ritesh Rajan) reappears from out of the blue. A sweet-natured, fitness-obsessed goofball, Sonny blithely refuses to address his bipolar disorder, and Monica is wary of embracing his presence lest they repeat past traumas. So what inspired her to write the film?
“The initial inspiration was me winning my fourth grade Spelling Bee. And then I went on to regionals, and I lost in the first round on the word radish. I spelled it with two D’s instead of one. It was pretty devastating. And I've obviously remembered that for the rest of my life.” Core memory established, I say and she gives a hearty laugh. “Yes, yes. And then in 2015, I was in the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy sketch writing class. And we had to write new sketches every single week. So one week, one of my sketches was titled, ‘Where are they now? Spelling Bee winners.’ And if you Google, the former Spelling Bee winners, they're all very successful. They're NASA scientists. They are designing robots. They're champions on the World Poker.”
Or like Sujata, on Netflix.
“And the punchline of my sketch was that there was a young woman who didn't grow up to live up to her potential. And she's still living at home. And she's kind of a bomb, and smoking weed, just kind of partying and stuff. So it was in late 2016, I I did the Sundance screenwriting lab, and then in early 2017, went to Sundance Film Festival for the first time, and my friend Justin Chon's film Gook was playing there, premiering. And I was blown away by his film, so I cornered him at his party, and I asked him how you got it made. And he said, I just asked my friends and family for money, and we just shot it ourselves. And I was like, cool. That's what I'm going to do.”
A still from the film, Definition, Please
And she did. In 2017, she started writing the feature film version of Definition, Please, based just on that four page sketch that she had written for comedy class. “And I took that initial idea of a former spelling bee champion, who doesn't live up to her potential and expanded it and asked the questions of, okay, why, what what's going on in her life that makes her not want to move on to the next stage?” she says. “And I answer that question with oh, it's her relationships with her family. She has to figure that out before she can. She has to clear her mind with that, before she can take the job.”
It’s a familiar issue for many south Asians. With family being such a core part of the culture, for many, life doesn’t start until family is appeased. Armed with her first draft - which took just 8 months to write, Sujata returned to where it all began. “I went back to Sundance Film Festival,” she says. “This time with HBO. And Justin's next film Ms. Purple was playing there. And I yelled at myself, because I was like, oh, Justin’s done two movies in two years, and I have zero. So that's where I made the decision to make Definition, Please. And we were gonna shoot it in the summer of 2019. And we made it happen.” And it was all self-financed.
A still from the film, Definition, Please.
She explains: “In 2019 when I was at Sundance, and I made that decision, something serendipitous happened. I got this email from my agent saying that one of my television shows that I had previously sold was caught up in a big studio merger and they were returning the rights of the show back to me, along with a huge check. And I was like, great. I'm gonna put all of this money into my film. So I was the first investor into Definition, Please. And then after that everyone I would have coffee with or lunch with, I would say, ‘hey, I'm raising money for my film. Do you want to put money into my film? Or do you know any friends or family that would be interested?’ And generally, you know, I'm friends with a lot of actors, we don't have like, a tonne of money. So, they would be like, ‘oh, well, I can't. But I have a cousin, who's in finance.’ And these are all brown people, by the way, they say, ‘I have a cousin who's a dentist, or my brother's a doctor, and this person's in finance.’ So they would connect me to these other people within our community, which was really cool, who actually were excited about the project, and wanted to see themselves on screen. And so that's how I raised the rest of the money.”
In a way, her story is the quintessential American dream and an example of what backing yourself and having tenacity can really achieve. But Sujata’s character Monica, she says is “stuck in a state of arrested development. This film leads you to believe that Sonny is the one with the mental health problems, but Monique has also got issues of her own. And, it's a lot more subtle, but it's like, she's stuck. She sees the world through these definitions. She's not good with interactions with strangers. And so I wanted to showcase that in a subtle way as well. And of course, her mom, Jaya also has her own issues. And you're like, oh, all three of these people are actually dealing with their own version of mental health.”
A still from the film, Definition, Please.
This acknowledgment of mental health struggles in a south Asian family is part of the reason why the film has received so many accolades. Reflecting on it, she says, “[when] we shot the movie, it was pre pandemic. But now, you know, after two years of what we've been living through, I think we're all dealing with different stages of, loneliness or anxiety.” In short, I say, we all have baggage. Sujata’s work with directing began with music and then a short film, titled Cowboys and Indian. As part of a duet called Naked Hipster Project, Sujata’s music is some of the most innocent and positive you’re likely to come across. Although made in 2017, she says “we've kind of taken a little break but I would love to get back into doing some more of those music videos.”
Today, Mindy Kaling is one of the film’s executive producers. How did that come about, I ask. “That was a complete and total surprise,” she says happily. “Like I said, we were finished with the film in early 2020 and then we were set to premiere at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. In late March, early April, obviously, that didn't happen - Covid happened. And we had to make a pivot, we had to adapt to whatever was going on in the world. And we decided to do the virtual film festival circuit. So we premiered at Pentonville Film Festival in August of 2020. And it was the best decision we could have ever made because we got really great press, really great reviews right off the bat. And then it was during a virtual fundraiser that Mindy mentioned, I believe it was around October/November, Mindy mentioned my name and the film and that she was excited to watch it. And my friends started texting me being like ‘yo she name called you’ and ‘I was like what what's going on? I don't understand.’ And then we got her the movie to watch and and then she started posting about it on social media and she was just really positive and so considerate with her posts and saying that she really enjoyed it. So then it was fairly recently it was probably like three or four months ago when I asked her to be EP and she said yes, so that was really great. And that certainly helped us get on the radar of certain people and get to Netflix. She was a big part of that.”
Mindy Kaling
Sujata is a big fan of Mindy. "I love all the shows that are coming out like I love Never Have I Ever, I love The Sex Lives of College Girls and she's really putting these like, young brown girls on screen that I would have died to watch when I was growing up. So it's really exciting for this next generation that they get to see different sides of being brown.” Indeed, it is because of creators like Mindy and Sujata, that people are seeing normal, ‘non-exotic-ised’ brown women and stories on screen. So what then, has her experience of Hollywood as a brown woman been like?
“I mean, I have auditioned for so many stereotypes just over and over. I've had to do the accent, I've had to wear a headscarf, even though I'm Hindu and not Muslim. And even currently, I'm getting scripts for me to consider directing and a lot of the plotlines revolve around arranged marriage. And I'm like, ‘yes, that's a small, tiny part of our culture. But why do we keep a pushing that in the story? And so for me, just with all of these stereotypes in these auditions in these projects, really pushed me to write my own script and to create the role that I wanted to play because I wasn't getting to audition for the roles like Monica.” And now, luckily for us, she’s determined to continue writing such scripts.
In fact she says, during the first year of the pandemic, “I wrote four scripts. And, I'm pretty much in pre production for my next feature film, which is an Indian American ensemble comedy. It's really, really fun. I would shoot it back home in Pennsylvania again. And I wrote a couple TV shows, and I'm out pitching them currently. And so hopefully, we'll also have a series on there soon.” Sujata is certainly an achiever then - quite unlike her character and when I point this out she says, “yeah, I'm kind of the opposite of Monica actually. But it wasn't difficult to write because I was channelling people from my life, I was channelling my friends. I was channelling cousins. And Monica is made up a whole bunch of different people.”
Despite her success, for most people of colour, there are still a lot of barriers to entry in general, in Hollywood and Sujata agrees. Change begins, she believes, behind the screen. “If you think about Ava DuVernay,” she says, “and how in Queen Sugar, she hired all female directors. And she really thinks about inclusivity behind the scenes and so does Isa Ray. And for me working on Awkward Black Girl from the very beginning, into insecure on HBO. I saw it, walking onto the set of an HBO show and just being surrounded by powerful black women was awe inspiring. It was really, really great. And you just have to hire people. And that's what everyone in Hollywood needs to do. I think something that's happening is there's a lot of fellowships and workshops and foundations and things you can apply for where they like take you through mentoring, and a lot of my super talented friends are doing those, but they should be hired. They don't need to be going through workshops to learn how to direct when they've already made three feature films. It needs to start with I think the executives who are green-lighting shows. What kind of shows are they green-lighting? Who are the creators behind the shows? It's, yes, it's producers, but it's it's also managers and agents. Who are they repping? Who are they sending to these projects? Like would their list of actors, their list of cinematographers, their lists of directors be inclusive?”
The film also features Lalanie from Lizzie McGuire
So what would be her advice for other young South Asian women looking to become directors? “I would say, you better start creating right now, you better make those videos. Now. There's no excuse to not create, even if a feature seems really daunting to everyone, obviously. So make little Tik-Tok videos, make IG videos, make YouTube videos. That's how we all started on Awkward Black Girl, and look where we are now. So the more you create, the better, you know, don't worry about being perfect. Just do it and put it out there. And guess what you're even if it's not perfect, you're going to learn from the experience, and your next video is going to be better. So just do it. Get it out there. Stop waiting for other people to give you permission.”
So go on then, what are you waiting for? You can watch the interview below.