Hasan Minhaj, Lena Khan & Prashanth Venkataramanujam: Inside the Making of Netflix’s Best of the Best — Bringing Bollywood to Hollywood
South Asian Trailblazers
Host Simi Shah sits down with Hasan Minhaj, Prashanth Venkataramanujam, and Lena Khan to discuss the creation of the Netflix film 'Best of t
Key takeaways
- The film was developed over six years to provide joyful, meaningful storytelling during the pandemic era.
- Director Lena Khan emphasizes that an all-brown cast allows characters to exist as nuanced people rather than mere cultural representatives.
Main topics
- Making of Best of the Best
- South Asian representation in Hollywood
Notable quotes
When you have an all-brown cast, the actors and the cast just get to be people rather than representatives of the culture.
Conclusion
The episode highlights how grit, creative vision, and a commitment to
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Why this film? Why this team? And why now? Speaker 3 (0:03) We've been fighting for this movie for six years, and let's have our first American collegiate Bollywood dance competition that's backed by a major studio. Scripts like this have been floating around for a long time, but it was that moment to say, who's going to put their shoulder in the steering wheel and do it? Speaker 1 (0:19) When you have an all-brown cast, the actors and the cast just get to be people rather than representatives of the culture. Every second South Asian project you see, you got like, oh, Speaker 2 (0:29) the side character who's the brown dude and how he brings smelly food to work. Can't get a date. And I'm like, why is it so sad? All the brown people actually just got to be like characters and have nuances and be people. Speaker 1 (0:40) Do you all feel like South Asians can create stories about our community that are also commercially viable? We had Speaker 2 (0:48) people clapping out loud every single moment Arjun was on screen. And for a young brown dude to be a love interest, Speaker 1 (0:55) we have arrived. What was the hardest part of making this film? Speaker 4 (0:59) This movie is a multi-front war. The South Asians are going to come with so much scrutiny. Speaker 1 (1:05) Absolutely. Speaker 4 (1:06) Collegiate Speaker 3 (1:07) Bollywood dance, this isn't just a South Asian art form. It's an American art form now. You're all from different parts of the diaspora. And we're taking all these different components that shaped who we are to create this new piece of art. Speaker 1 (1:21) I'm Simi Shah, and welcome to South Asian Trailblazers. There's a new movie out on Netflix called Best of the Best. It's a coming-of-age comedy set on the competitive Bollywood fusion dance circuit. And if you were on a South Asian dance team in college, like I was, you know exactly the world I'm talking about. And so today, I'm sitting down with the three people who brought this film to life. Actor and comedian Hasan Minhaj. who spent years as a correspondent on The Daily Show, broke out with his special Homecoming Kings, and went on to create Patriot Act. He has since brought shows like The King's Jester, and most recently, Hasan Hates Ronnie and Ronnie Hates Hasan with Ronnie Chang on tour. And he also made this film alongside his longtime collaborator, Prashant Venkataramanujam, who's the co-founder of 186K Films with Hasan, and whose credits include Patriot Act, which the two of them created together, as well as Bill Nye Saves the World, and this year alone, Riz Ahmed's series Bait. Joining them is director Lina Khan, whose credits include The Tiger Hunter, which she wrote and directed, Disney's Flora and Ulysses, and episodes of Never Have I Ever. These are three very different resumes, but there's one through line through all of it. They chose to come together and make this film. And here's the story of how and why. Speaker 1 (2:54) Thank you guys so much for doing this. I had such a joy watching the film about a month ago and then again last night. It was a very, very special evening. Where I really want to start is I know this film was six years in the making. It initially started as for the culture. I'm curious, why this film? Why this team? And why now? Speaker 4 (3:14) I think that as we started making it and started talking about it, we realized Asa and I just kept like... we realized like, how has this not been made yet? That's the question that kind of kept coming up. And the more and more we discussed it, it was just cracking us up. You know, just the Sasa kids, the acapella kids, the dance kids. It was just like a whole world. I was on a dance team, so Speaker 1 (3:39) I know. Yeah. And we were just Speaker 4 (3:41) like, there's so many characters. And, you know, after we got done with Patriot Act, it was, we were in the depths of the pandemic and we just wanted to do something that was joyful. but had a real story behind it. We just didn't want to do something that was like frivolous and, oh, this is just a dance movie. We wanted to make sure it was like a real meaningful, it was saying something, you know, because it's pretty easy to just rest on the idea that like, oh, this is a dance movie and people will come for the music and the dancing, but, you know, they're not expected to have depth or nuance or trying to be saying anything about, you know, South Asian culture or life or, you know, anything meaningful. And so. Once we kind of found the girls as our kind of central characters and we realized we wanted to make it about the dance team, everything just kind of fell into place from that point. Speaker 3 (4:29) It also felt like the secret that I wanted to share and we wanted to share with the world. Just how you said you were like, I was part of it too. We all have this chapter in our lives where it's like, we're on a dance team. We're ruining our GPAs. We're lying to our parents. We're falling in love. I got married from it. It's this chapter in our lives. There's these cassettes that play in our parents' cars. There's these songs that we grew up with. There are these movie references that we have that just get to be a part of us. And then we grow up and then we work at KPMG and we don't talk about this anymore, but it's in all of us. There's like video of all of us growing up here in the United States, dancing as children, singing these songs and to share that with people. It's a very real thing we have. And it's this. joyous feeling that we have. And I felt what PV felt. I was like, how has this not been made before? And I wanted to take our kind of collective, let's call it showbiz political capital and said, Hey, let's put our shoulder in the steering wheel. And we've been fighting for this movie for six years. Let's put it through the studio system and let's have our first. Speaker 3 (5:39) American collegiate Bollywood dance competition that's backed by a major studio. Scripts like this have been floating around for a long time, but it was that moment to say, who's going to put their shoulder in the steering wheel and do it? And who's going to direct this thing? It's Lena Kahn. Speaker 1 (5:53) I love it. Lena, you said something very beautiful at the premiere, which is when you have an all-brown cast. the actors and the cast just get to be people rather than representatives of the culture. Can you expand a little bit on what you meant by that and how that played out for you in directing this film? Speaker 2 (6:10) Yeah, it's like every, you know, every second. South Asian project you see, you got like, oh, the side character who's the brown dude. And every story that relates to him is about his brownness and how he brings smelly food to work or whatever it is and how he can't get a date. And I'm like, why is this so sad? Like, I was like, you could be a mom, you could be a daughter, you could be a best friend. And if everybody's brown, you could actually be those things and not like, I am the token brown person. We had a token white person. And so all the brown people actually just got to be like characters and have nuances and be people. Absolutely. I have Speaker 4 (6:42) to add too, and this is something Maitre told me when we were working on the film, of how rare it is to have this many South Asians in a cast that are not related. Wow, that's a great point. And Speaker 3 (6:58) that Speaker 4 (6:58) has been burned in my brain ever since she told me that. I was like, wow, yeah. This is not based on a family unit. Like, that's another, to your point, like, that's where Nirbhay gets to be. near Bay and you know, uh, even the token white guy, like there were, there were white frat guys. Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:15) We're not even, Speaker 4 (7:16) they're not even getting pigeonholed. You know what I mean? Right. And like, you know, Sumi gets to be the, the, the strange psycho one, you know Speaker 2 (7:23) what Speaker 4 (7:23) I mean? Like it's like, but they're not all like, Oh, they all have to go home to, you know, a family, one household and they have to relate Speaker 3 (7:30) to each other as brother and sister. You have to meet cousin Nikhil. Yeah. It's always in relation to that. Yeah. I Speaker 1 (7:35) find that super interesting also because In the film, you play Professor Hamza Lateef, who's guiding the students and sort of this mentor figure. You're the faculty sponsor of SASA. But I also feel like that very much parallels to real life in the role you all are playing in shepherding the next