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14 DGA QUARTERLY FOCUS INDIE VOICE | CONTINUED movie is just shoot it as written, which is mostly in a writers' room," says Ganatra. Especially with a running gag that the male writers who make up most of the cast are, basically, identical. As a visual joke, Ganatra shot a beat where all the men turn at once to watch Molly enter the room, as though as- similated by the Borg in Star Trek. For depth and light, Ganatra made the aesthetic choice to pick an above-average room with views of Manhattan. To heighten the feeling of claustropho- bia, the director decided to shoot scenes where the writers step out- side. Notes Ganatra, "If you don't show what they 're sequestered from, it won't read like they're se- questered from the world." Still, the set needed more to credibly establish the show 's long history. Ganatra handed Thompson a box of props and two outfits that could be color- changed in post, and they im- provised 30 years of skits in an afternoon. For background s h ot s, e ve r y o f fi c e e xt r a wa s assigned a specific job, from cue cards to graphic design, so no one would be aim- lessly shu ing papers. "That's something I think All the President's Men did really well," says Ganatra. "Nobody in those rooms looks like they're just sitting at a typewriter typing." Tonight With Katherine Newbury had to look iconic, yet musty. The composer Lesley Barber even wrote an original theme song just generic enough to sound believable. As for the live studio audience, Ganatra could only a ord to hire them once. "The produc- ers were like, 'We gotta shoot all your reac- tion shots on the same day,'" sighs Ganatra. "That meant that me and the 1st AD (Julie A. Bloom) reenacted all of Emma Thomp- son's fi rst scenes so the audience would have something to actually react to. At one point, I was like, 'Mindy, can you just go up there and start telling jokes, so they laugh?'" Kaling wasn't the only comedian. Before signing on, Ganatra fl ew to London to meet Thompson, who was already attached. The two connected over a three-hour walk, and when they made it back home, Thompson's 86-year-old mother Phyllida Law, an actress herself, hooted, "Are you going to play an- other boring woman in an ugly frock?" Law was serious about her daughter's dormant comedy talents. To prove it, Thompson handed Ganatra a stash of VHS tapes of her doing stand-up in the '80s. One of those old stand-up sets made it into the fi lm, though most of the words were dubbed with Late Night-themed punchlines written to incorporate snippets of Thomp- son's original dialogue. "An editing trick," Ganatra explains. Back then, Thompson used to time her routines with a stopwatch. Ganatra added that detail to the film's first fragmented glimpse of Katherine in the wings. "You get what a perfectionist she is right away," says Ganatra. For Katherine's grand en- trance, Ganatra would holler, "Katherine Newbury!" and Thompson would shrug her shoulders, fi x her lipstick and walk out. "She's been in the wings of the Oscars and the BAFTAs—why not just embrace what she'd do?" When Katherine emerges from the shadows, the camera soaks in her profi le. She looks like an icon. It's not a spoiler that Katherine eventu- ally delivers a humbled, on-air speech. Yet, on the shooting day, Thompson was con- tinually interrupted by loud trucks. "You could see it agitating her," says Ganatra. In the cutting room, her editor Eleanor Infan- te realized those awkward pauses helped solve that scene's biggest challenge: how to glance away from Katherine to check in with other characters. "Her frustration was a beautiful, cinematic accident. It al- lowed me a natural cutting point to go to other people without losing the impact of Emma's monologue." Early on, Ganatra decided to use camera movements to link Katherine and Molly 's parallel journeys as the odd-women-out. "If Katherine was in a single, three-quarters-away from the camera, we would mimic that shot for Molly. When she's in a smooth dolly shot, Molly 's in a smooth dolly shot." For the score, the characters have similar themes. "We're always being told these are the same person musi- cally, even though they couldn't be more di erent." " I a l w a y s c o m e f r o m character," says Ganatra. Her style is deeply humanist, both in the projects she picks and the way she approaches them. What unites her career from indies to television to today is her emphasis on creating the same supportive environment that made Chutney Popcorn a success. "I don't hire people that aren't collaborative, and I truly respect other department heads and what they bring," she says. "If I just tell people what to do, it's only going to be as good as I see it. But if I can take everyone's inspiration and put it together, it's going to be better than any of us can imagine." Even so, how did Ganatra direct Kaling when Kaling literally wrote her own char- acter? Answer: by reminding Kaling of her roots. "Mindy walks into a room like she owns the room," says Ganatra. "I did a lot of re- hearsal with her to rewind her and take her back to before she became this formidable show-runner. We had a lot of talks about her feelings and her fears and her anxieties. Her many, many, many secret crying moments." "I said, 'This is my story. I'm Molly,'" re- calls Ganatra. "And she said, 'No, I'm Molly!'" Finally, they called a truce. "We both were like, 'Okay, we're Molly.'"® "I really wanted to make an adult movie with smart people talking about political issues in a funny way." — Nisha Ganatra on Late Night » Ganatra works with Emma Thompson, who plays a talk-show host in Late Night PHOTO: EMILY ARAGONES/AMAZON STUDIOS