In 2021, real-life couple Roshan Sethi and Karan Soni collaborated on 7 Days, a film that tackled the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of two Indian millennials trying to find love. Now, the director and actor respectively are back with another romantic comedy that hits even closer to home. In A Nice Indian Boy, Naveen (Soni) falls for Jay (Jonathan Groff, Mindhunter), a white man adopted and raised by Indian parents. Things proceed quickly, however Naveen is nervous to introduce Jay to his traditional family: his overbearing mother (Zarna Garg), his quietly disapproving father (Harish Patel) and his overachieving sister (Sunita Mani). Off-screen, Sethi and Soni are in a relationship and intend on getting married despite their own families’ resistance.
Sethi, who directed this film in part to reclaim what he hopes will be his own dream wedding, has been public about his refusal to accept the archaic views held by older, more traditional generations of religious Indians. Yet, in a conversation GVN held with both Sethi and Soni before A Nice Indian Boy’s premiere at the SXSW Film & TV Festival this past year, Sethi himself admitted that the film challenged this dismissal. Based on a play by Madhuri Shaker and adapted into a screenplay by Eric Randall, what begins as an initially hilarious comedy unfolds into a more complex but touching family story that makes earnest attempts to bridge generational divides.
Naveen is initially nervous to introduce Jay to his parents, knowing that it will not fulfill his parents’ expectations. However, Jay is turned off by Naveen’s refusal to be himself with his family. This lays down the film’s stakes, but further investigation into his parents’ romance show that they aren’t merely ignorant or bigoted toward his sexuality. As is usually the case, their struggles to understand their son are merely a reflection of their own doubts. Without spoiling how the film ends, it goes without saying that the film’s heart comes from the family learning more about each other’s insecurities and how to grow together as a unit. It’s a dynamic you rarely find in queer cinema, making A Nice Indian Boy quietly unprecedented.
Sethi and Soni spoke about approaching these topics, as well as working with their immensely talented ensemble, in this exclusive conversation, edited for length and clarity.
I have to tell you this film spoke to me in a very deep way. I’m Jewish and my family is very religious. There are lines of dialogue in this movie that feel ripped from my life, so thank you for making it. I was shocked to learn that you didn’t write it and that it was based on a play because it felt like such a personal piece. How did you discover the play?
Roshan Sethi: Well, the play has been up since 2012. It was written by Madhuri Shaker, who’s an amazing writer, and was optioned by Eleventy, the production company, who hired Eric Randall, a screenwriter, to write it. The play was written by a straight Indian woman and then rewritten into a screenplay by a white gay man. Then, I, as director, and Karan, since we had made 7 Days together, came on at the exact same time and we brought our own flavor to it. There were all these influences along the way, but I really do think that the genius of the writing is that Madhuri and Eric brought completely different life experiences and ways of approaching the world to [the film]. It deals with the love story to the same extent that it deals with the sister coping with a divorce [to the same extent] that it deals with the mother dealing with whether or not she has real love with her husband of many, many years. I don’t think those things would all exist in one movie were it not for both a straight woman and the gay guy writing it.
Karan Soni: I actually came in contact with the play in 2018. Paul Feig’s company was trying to make it into a multi-cam TV show.
Wow.
Soni: This is just Hollywood lore. [All laugh] You know, things go around. I was friends with [Feig]––I’d worked with him––and he had been like, “You would be perfect for [this]…” I remember reading the play and being like, “This feels like it was written for me.” Sometimes you read something and you’re like I feel like someone is taking my thoughts and putting them [down], and sometimes you’re trying to change yourself to play someone. This felt like I didn’t have to do that. I met Madhuri and she came to LA, but it didn’t end up selling in that form. Later, she decided it would be better as a movie. The movie script had done such a good job of condensing what was in the play into a beautiful story. Everything has its own thing, but I think it deserves to exist in this form. It felt too good to be true, honestly. We were like, “If we get to make this together, it would be crazy.” As we were waiting for the movie to get [financed], we were able to add little flourishes and changes that made it a little bit more personal to us. I wasn’t a doctor, for example, in the original version. Roshan’s obsessed with making me a doctor and putting medicine in everything. [We all laugh, knowing Sethi is a doctor as well as a filmmaker.] When [the setting] became the hospital, it was just so much better. The scenes of the two gay doctors discussing a date in scrubs, I couldn’t imagine anything else. In some versions, my character is a lot like how Roshan was right as he came out. So, it felt right that I was doing it as a doctor.
Sethi: The film is a lot of our love story.
Your debut feature collaboration, 7 Days, was made during the pandemic and with very specific constraints. As soon as the movie starts, you immediately feel that this is so much bigger. You’re entering a new level in terms of your directing. I would love to hear about that transition. We can’t fully compare the productions, but I also have to imagine there’s a huge jump.
Sethi: Well, 7 Days was made for 150 thousand and shot with a cast and crew of eleven people. There was no first AD, there was no production designer, there was no script supervisor, there was nothing. It was about as bare bones as an experience could be. This movie was obviously very different; I will not say the budget of this movie for obvious reasons, but it was not $150,000. In between these two movies, even though I had signed on to do this movie right after 7 Days, I actually directed another movie, a Disney+ musical called World’s Best, which is a hip hop musical. It had an 18 million budget and was very expansive in its scale. That was the first time that I had ever done anything of that scale, and I learned so much from that [film] that ended up being very useful for this movie. So, I wasn’t as intimidated as I might otherwise have been. This was actually, theoretically, easier than the big musical that I had just done, but it was more complex in other ways. Anytime you have a movie that is composed almost entirely of scenes of multiple people talking to each other, that is hard. It is so hard to get all that coverage, to keep it alive, to figure out the comedy, to figure out the editing.
Talk to me about those scenes. I can feel that you’re letting these scenes really breathe. You’re not trying to sensationalize anything, they feel really honest. There’s one beautiful conversation between Karan and [co-star] Sunita Mani that is so touching. With that scene, for example, what is your first instinct in terms of coverage?
Sethi: Those scenes, I think, live and die on performance. Literally nothing matters but the acting. That conversation could be delivered in the most ham-handed, boring way. At that point, it’s literally about doing whatever you can to facilitate the performances, which I think often means simplifying the coverage as much as possible. There are only three setups for what is almost a three-minute scene. In contrast, the end, which is also three minutes, is 52 setups. So, it was very simply accomplished. I try to use cross-coverage as much as possible where you’re covering two people at once so that they can both be present and recorded for that conversation. Whatever happened in that scene, which is one of my favorites in the movie, was all Karan and Sunita. It feels like they’ve known each other forever. Even though there are funny-ish moments in there, nothing feels like it’s being forced. It took literally ten minutes to edit. It was almost nothing. It’s the effect of good performance. Most of what you’re seeing in this movie was accomplished in one or two takes. We moved very fast, but it’s because they’re all so good.
Soni: Roshan has a real respect for acting, and it’s crazy how many directors find acting to be something you have to get through because they’re worried about the shot. I feel like filmmakers fit into two camps. One is more obsessed with the technical aspect and, when you’re working as an actor, you’re just like, “I’m a part of this machine.” The second love actors and they’re trying to facilitate and find moments. In the best case, you can get both worlds in the same movie, which this movie has, I think. But, usually, the actors can smell if someone is like, “I just need you to hit this mark and say the line.” It’s an unsaid thing, but when actors feel like someone appreciates what they’re doing, they’ll give better work because you feel like there’s understanding. You have to create a sacredness that’s hard to describe in words, but either the person has it or they don’t.
Let’s talk about some of the other members of your ensemble. Let’s start with [Jonathan] Groff.
Soni: Yes!
Sethi: We love Groff.
He’s a theater star, we know this, and the television world was introduced to him through Mindhunter, which is great. But people who have seen him perform know that this performance is the first one where the film community is being introduced to his natural persona.
Soni: That’s true.
Sethi: The people who recognize him are either musical gays or they’re straight men who watch Mindhunter.
[laughs]
Sethi: It’s jarring because he’ll walk through the streets of Vancouver, and it’ll go from one entirely different person to another. Recognizing him, you can’t believe the diversity of reactions he provokes or how widely watched Mindhunter is.
The fanbase is fervent on that show.
Sethi: I didn’t appreciate its fame. Yeah, he is very much playing a version of himself and he’s so good.
How did he get involved?
Sethi: He came to the movie just because we submitted the script to him. He watched 7 Days and said, “I know that Indian actor is straight, but maybe he could play gay. Have you asked him?” [All laugh] I’m like, “No. I mean, he’s gay. He’s gay with me. We’re gay.”
Soni: He was like, “Can we get him? You have me so you can get away with it…”
Sethi: He was weirdly very sure that Karan was straight because he brought it up in the context of “I know we shouldn’t be casting straight actors gay, but maybe we can make an exception for Karan.”
That’s the funniest thing ever.
Soni: That was his only note and we solved it very quickly.
For my next question, I have to preface with the coincidence that I went to go see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on tour, where [co-star] Zarna Garg was the opener.
Sethi: Yes! You saw Zarna!
I was blown away by her. That was a few months ago. Then, I see this film and I see her, and I’m like, “I know this woman from somewhere!” When I recognized her, I just got so excited. Talk to me about meeting and casting her.
Sethi: Zarna came to my attention through Instagram because she has a very devoted following. She’s nearing a million followers and has a huge platform there that she has built from the ground up. She’s never acted before, so we asked her if she would consider it. She said yes and then we did an audition. She’d literally never done an audition before but she was immediately really, really talented, and it was the same thing on set. She’s really extraordinary. She’s very fast, very intelligent, and picks things up like that. I mean, here’s someone who is like my mother operating an Instagram empire. She’s savvy.
Soni: And she had to learn set etiquette right away, too. She’d never seen a slate. When the slate came in, she’s like, “Do we start saying the lines?” And I was like, “No.” [laughs] She didn’t understand. Roshan was really helpful with her because it was a lot to absorb. Acting in anything is so different even from an audition because there’s continuity and there’s coverage and all this stuff. He was very gentle with her and helped make it very safe for her to try and fail and try again. It was a lot but then she gave this performance.
Sethi: Karan and her both improvise a lot in the movie, just like 7 Days where 50% of the dialogue was improvised. [The percentage] wasn’t that high in this movie, but a lot of what Karan says and what Zarna says is completely out of their heads..
I think there are a lot of stories, including some at this festival, where you have queer people working out a relationship with their parents. In some stories, the parents are kept as antagonists of the story and they aren’t understanding and the protagonist has to evolve past that. Then there are stories like this where we’re trying to bridge the gap between two different generations. Roshan, could you speak about your approach to the portrayal of that divide in this film?
Sethi: It’s so interesting because I think if I had written this movie, the parents would be the outright villains. That’s where I was, and maybe still am, in terms of my level of empathy for Indians of that generation who can’t get on board with the simple fact of the humanity of their children––as you can tell from the way I’m talking about it. But the movie, the script, the play, all of it has a tremendous empathy for the parents. I thought that was the most interesting creative choice, to give them so many valid reasons for the things they say and do. It was the thing that I respected. It’s not my impulse in any way, but I love that they had come to that place, and I actually learned a lot because the movie asks you to consider how the dad is feeling. It asks you to consider how the mom is feeling. That’s an unusual choice. It all came from the script and it gave me more empathy for the whole thing.
The SXSW audience is one of my favorite festival audiences because they’re open to anything they can get their hands on. What are you both most excited for in terms of what audiences will take away from this film?
Soni: I think [this film] weirdly, in its best-case scenario, can speak to multiple generations. You leave understanding the other person’s perspective a little bit better. Our dream is that someone who is going through a similar situation––doesn’t have to be queer, it can be just a generational divide of any kind––can relax and be like, “I can watch this with my parent,” or “I can watch this with my children,” and it’s something they can share together.
Sethi: I would say the same thing. We feel really excited to be at SXSW because it does feel like the ideal audience in so many ways for the reasons Karan mentioned. We’re here in a very conservative state, where apparently gay bars are under threat, and at the same time, Austin is a very progressive, liberal place. It is that weird mixture. I would say one of the things about the movie is that it is not alienating. I think so much of what we call niche or diverse content is deliberately alienating. “This is my life, and if you don’t like it, you can fuck off.” It’s the subtext of so many of these movies. Honestly, that’s more me than what I just said. But the script for this movie is very warm and inviting and populist. That, again, would not have been my first instinct, but I came to really love and respect it.
That’s the biggest directorial challenge, telling a story where the instinct is the exact opposite of your own.
Sethi: Well, I’ve learned not to pay too much attention to my confrontational side because I have a lot of politically confrontational hot takes, and yet this movie doesn’t feel like that at all. It doesn’t resemble my personality, but that is not the job of directing. The job of directing is to listen really hard to where everything is coming from, what people are saying, what’s working, what feels right, almost as if you’re clinically dispassionate to the whole thing. That’s one style of directing. I think many people direct with a very firm point of view, but to me, the greatest thing about directing is you’re working with all these extremely talented people: talented writers, talented actors, talented photographers. You get to be there to shepherd and shape and experience without making it about you because that becomes a different thing.
A Nice Indian Boy held its World Premiere as part of the Narrative Spotlight section at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.