00:00Actually, the germ of the film was that I wanted to make a film about women's friendship
00:09across generations and I was searching for like the right place to place the film and
00:16I am from Mumbai so I definitely would have been in the backdrop but at one point I was
00:21spending a lot of time in hospitals due to some personal reasons and I felt that hospital
00:26is a space where women are very much in the workforce and it's a very tough job like
00:35you have to be very unemotional as a nurse you know like you can never see what's going on in my mind
00:42so I think for the themes which I wanted to explore for that reason the hospital space, the nursing
00:49profession it all something in my mind I felt that this makes sense and through the hospital
00:55I was able to talk about other things like contraception and you know bodies of women
01:00and all these things so that was an extra thing that I got.
01:09See, one it was a beautifully made film. See, any film that can cut across and give you emotions in a place
01:17that you don't know you never it's so I'm saying a hospital is so common to all our lives but
01:23just to know that in a little more detail is shakes you all up and the fact that this cinema
01:30does that so beautifully and it's a slice of life that India should know that this is
01:35what living in Mumbai means, this is what living a life that's so hard yet so normal
01:42and like in the hospital setting where you have to like nurses are very straight, their whole
01:49life is about not showing emotions to the people they're around and yeah I think all of that
01:56comes together and the fact that it's put packaged beautifully in like a coming-of-age type of story.
02:02So to me that narrative was very new, very beautiful and we've been trying to push cinema
02:09like this in the regional world for a while but the fact that Paya didn't care about region or
02:15language is what I was so excited about. She used native Malayali people to speak Malayalam
02:21to write it so beautifully, set it in Bombay, there's enough Hindi. It just feels like a film
02:26for everybody. So I think and that's something that took me by surprise and
02:32then yeah that's it then we got on board, that's how we were happy, Paya was happy with us.
02:37She had a whole set of distributors from the globe that was coming.
02:42Actually, it's out now in over 50 countries and start releasing one after the other
02:49and that's pretty phenomenal.
02:56I am a big fan of darkness because I think that darkness gives us the ability to project our own
03:02thoughts and feelings into it. It's very open darkness. So I wanted to work or you know in
03:08today's image making like whatever images we see especially advertisement and everything is very
03:14bright. So I wanted to go back to some of that darkness also because life is both bright and
03:21without darkness there can't be light, without light there can't be darkness. That was the hope
03:25so I'm happy to hear you say that or some other thing is that like the film is about people who
03:32go to work every day in a city like Mumbai and Mumbai is a city as you know that never
03:38rests, it's very fast-paced. So half your time which is in the daytime most of it goes in
03:44traveling in the train, working for eight, nine hours and traveling back. So the only time that
03:49is your own are the nights. Reclaiming the nights was important to me.
03:56See one is I have to be, I have to tell you it was like it took me about 40 minutes to
04:05realize it's actually a film and it's not real because I was so engrossed in the way the story
04:11was told in the way the actors performed. All of that just was too perfect for me to
04:18see and I think see every filmmaker uses a certain effect to get closer to the audience
04:24it doesn't matter bright, dark. That story will give you a certain reason to say it a certain
04:29manner and I think what Pyle's used is like as good as what any other filmmaker would have
04:36used to tell a story like this. So it uses the function very clearly and whether it's
04:42the same for me like it did to you and that's it, then you know it works and finally cinema
04:48is something that you want to be immersed in. You want to see something that you've
04:52never seen or experienced people or feelings that you've never felt before and that's
04:57what cinema means and I feel like it sticks off all of those boxes.
05:05I really like the cinema has the ability to you know it's a great medium. We can do so
05:12much, it's so liberating cinema you know there's no restriction, you can have such crazy fun.
05:18So I really like that dialogues are coming from somewhere, put the seed on something else because
05:24I feel that that gives like that is also editing. That thing gives the audience also a different
05:30way to see the same thing. And it adds a lot of depth also. It just makes your mind wonder
05:37I really like this kind of thing. So that particular shot you're talking about, thanks for noticing it
05:42was one of my favorite shots in the film. Like I felt like that's the first time it's like
05:47she's letting down her guard.
06:12I was thinking of the sari like that, that it's lying over there and also
06:22the second very simple thing is also that in Mumbai monsoons you can't dry your clothes.
06:28So even your apartment suddenly changes and so that was again that's a more
06:34functional thing but more it was this thing of she's shedding her inhibitions and opening up
06:39for the first time but thanks for noticing that I really thought a lot about it.
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