Born in Hyderabad and raised in California, Apoorva Guru Charan started her career as a digital producer in Singapore and is now based in Los Angeles. With several award-winning shorts behind her as a producer, she made her producorial feature film debut, with Saim Sadiq’s, Joyland, that premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival (2022) and won the section’s Jury Prize as well as the Queer Palm. Her second production, Liz Sargent’s Take Me Home, premiered in the US Dramatic section in Sundance Film Festival earlier this year taking home the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sargent, with Apoorva herself bagging the Sundance Institute Producers Award for Fiction, presented by Amazon MGM Studios. It went on to play in Berlinale that also featured Sarmad Khoosat’s Lali with Apoorva on board as the executive producer.
In a conversation with CE, the producer talks about the art, craft and business of film production during a sojourn in Ujjain with her mother. It was right after attending a friend's wedding and the day before her travels to meet her grandmother in Hyderabad.
Excerpts:
To begin with the beginning, your roots are in Hyderabad?
Yes, definitely my roots are in Hyderabad. We left for California when I was 6-years-old. Then we moved back when I was 13. So, elementary school and middle school were in the US, and then high school was in India. It is a caregiving story. My grandmother—dad’s mother—had been ill for 13 years, and my mom and I moved back to India so that we could be closer to her and participate in the caregiving process.
I then went to Singapore for college. I was there for six years and then I went back to the US, to New York for film school, and then moved to LA about eight years ago.
When Liz shared the story of Take Me Home [about Anna, a Korean adoptee with cognitive disability, taking care of her aging American parents] she started speaking about caregiving, a theme that has been deeply resonant in my life as well, in my teenage years. That’s how I gravitated towards the film.
How has moving from one place to the other shaped you and your career?
When you move around a lot as a kid, stories have a way of grounding you to a place, or they help you escape it. It’s like the stories that we tell ourselves. I started producing theatre in high school. Hyderabad has such a rich theatre culture that I was starting to get exposed to. I went to business school in Singapore, but I produced theatre through college as well, and then I started working in TV, at Fremantle, out of their Singapore office. It’s then that I realized I had found my industry, found what I wanted to do. But I wanted to move into the narrative film space and that propelled me to go to Columbia.
What made you choose film production?
Perhaps it’s a little bit of the business background, but actually, being a producer is like being a serial entrepreneur and being an artist at the same time. I think you have to have a deep understanding of the arts, and of several different crafts. You have to understand the screenwriting process and be able to guide the screenwriter to do their best work. You have to understand the directing process, provide feedback on shots, performances, or on framing, blocking. We're like curators. If the director's the artist, we're there fine-tuning and curating everything. So I think there’s a deep understanding, and I also think there's an ability to drop down into the emotion of the scene, or try and understand what the story is, what the scene is at a granular level when we're on set. There’s a really deep understanding of the art and the emotional impact that it has on audiences.
On the other side is the business acumen of, who is going to watch this, what is the right budget level for us to make this. Where will we find our champions? How do we position it? Having done two first features now, I think it's also about how do we launch this filmmaker into the world? What are the best markets, or what are the best festivals where they're going to get the most attention for their film and for their own careers? How do we get the film to a wider audience?
Is there a particular approach which defines the Apoorva Charan style of production? What’s unique that you bring in?
I think in all of the stories we're trying to tell, there is a strong emotional core and there is a moral conscience. We're like vessels to help bring them to the world. Those two are non-negotiables for us. And then we're really thoughtful about the filmmakers that we work with and the craft of it. Is there a really strong voice behind it? Is there somebody who has lived experience who's telling this story from a place of deep authenticity? And does that person then have the craft? Does it show on the page, or how can we help them get us there? When it comes to the material and the story, we at All Caps [her production company] are a little bit traditional in that we follow the very American three-act screenwriting structure, because that familiarity allows us to take risks. I think Joyland is a good example. So many things about it were new, like setting a film in Lahore, having a global audience watch a Pakistani family, an audience that didn't have a reference for what Pakistani cinema was. But the story structure is so familiar that it allows the film to travel. It’s the same with Take Me Home. The traditional structure allowed creative risks, for the ending, and for the audience to really just drop into the protagonist Anna's perspective. You can ask the audience to do one or two things that are new, but I don't think you can ask them to do a whole lot that's new.
Take Me Home drew you in, because it's something you've experienced as a kid. Joyland would have been a different reality. What kind of inputs could you then provide for it?
I would say the feeling of patriarchy in South Asia is so real. I've been very lucky to have been raised and surrounded by some very kind men, parents and grandparents, but that's not to say that you don't witness it. I'm of a generation where there's so much more allowance to be who I am. But I saw the effects of patriarchy, especially on my mom. The responsibilities that you have to take on as a daughter-in-law and a daughter, and how does that affect your own life? I saw it in my grandmother not being able to work, things like that. Patriarchy can happen in very subtle ways for us.
When you say, what are the things that my own personality injects into the film. For Joyland, it would be a deep understanding of the effects of patriarchy and not being able to live as your honest, true self. Apart from that is the emotionality, which I understood at a core level, that meant that we could advocate for certain scenes or certain creative decisions. A note that we often got when we were in the edit was to cut down on the protagonist Haider’s wife Mumtaz's time, spend more time in the theatre, because that's exciting to see Haider fall in love with the transwoman Biba. But we thought in the process we’d be doing exactly what the rest of society is doing, which is making the woman at home invisible. That’s not the point of the film.
Something that came in the development process was Haider’s character. In early drafts he started off as somebody very angry and resentful of the world and then he became more tender as time went by. I think as Saim matured as a writer and filmmaker and a person, he had a much more tender, empathetic outlook.
Take Me Home was a very different filmmaking process, because it was structured improv. We were writing scenes on set, coming up with dialogue. We were all pitching dialogue, between Liz, our co-producer, and a script consultant, and then myself.
You did shorts before features. Does it prepare you better?
Absolutely. It was really helpful. All the shorts I made were either during film school, I made a handful through artist development programs, and maybe one independently but I would absolutely advocate for producers or any filmmakers, writers, directors, anybody to go through shorts. It helps build muscle. It helps with filmmaker relationships. Every film is a learning experience. We had big lessons on Joyland and Take Me Home, and the goal is to learn with the right people, and then to carry these learnings into your next film. Short films allow you to do that on a shorter timeline with a more stringent budget, so the lessons come a little bit faster. Then you can explore. You understand which filmmakers align with what you're trying to do, what their process is, how you can support them, and how you can tweak your own producing practice to support them. Some of the festivals and programmers have been tracking me from the short film days, so that's been really helpful as they see the process, the growth, and the trajectory.
How does attending labs help in this process?
The labs help with mentorship on a specific project. You have to be constantly learning as a filmmaker because the world is changing around us so rapidly, the politics, geopolitics, the media itself, the way we make films, the technology, audience behaviour. Labs provide a place for us to go away and focus on educating ourselves, honing our skills, and also providing us with the community. I think producers are the absorbers of everyone's emotions on set. You're the one that everybody comes to with questions. You have to provide all of the resources. So you learn together with and from the community of people. If I don't know the answer, I'll reach out to the producing cohorts in the various labs and ask who has experience with it. What did you guys do in this situation? It's really helpful to have a support system.
Joyland is set in Pakistan and Take Me Home is about the Korean diaspora in the US. That makes you a global player…
That is the idea. At All Caps, we are language agnostic, genre agnostic, and geography agnostic. That's how we define ourselves. For us, it's really important to know that emotion has no borders, a film should have no borders. We want to work with filmmakers from all over the world. I think something that's very exciting for me is to be able to take audiences into a part of the world that they weren't thinking about, and make them realise we're just like them. They have a story just like ours, that we're able to relate to on such a deep human level. It’s about empathy and human connection with people you've never met, from places you're not thinking about.
But is there a place where you feel you belong? Is US home?
Belong is a tough question. We can belong anywhere and everywhere. Right now it is where I have spent the most number of years consecutively. Sitting in LA, New York and London is where I feel you could make a movie about anywhere in the world. I don't know if I can do that in other places yet. I think maybe if I can do that in other places, I would be much more open, but until I'm established enough to do that LA is home for now.
Does any Indian project figure in the future?
Absolutely. We have two films set in India in development, and then I'm working with more Indian writers and directors. Hopefully we'll be able to announce some exciting things around them soon.
You must be inundated with requests from people to produce their films. How do you approach that?
The short and honest answer is that something has to speak to me. Unless there's a deep relationship with the filmmaker and the material, it's hard to make a commitment. There is so much talent out there, and I wish we could do it all, but we can't. And then I also think taste plays a very specific role, and craft plays a very specific role, and then the things that I said earlier, like the emotional core, moral conscience. I think those are the hard things to find in a project. Everybody has stories but I don't know if I can say, when I read the script, I'm dropping down into the emotional core of it quickly.
We have a limited capacity for first features, because a first feature is the most difficult thing to get made, and we do still have a couple more filmmakers that we believe in really strongly that we're taking some bets on. But they have all showed exemplary craft. They have had short films that have gone to incredible festivals, they've won at Cannes, they've played at Sundance, they've started to build a track record.
It's important for me to know that I'm also in the hands of a strong director, with a strong vision, and it's also important to show financing partners that there's a track record, there's somewhere for this film to go.
If people reach out from institutions like my film school, Columbia, or Sundance, Film Independent, then I always make it a point to respond and help as much as I can.
We do want to be those people who are championing filmmakers, and there's so much talent, there's so many stories to be told, but we acknowledge that it's such a difficult industry to get anything made.
