Sayani Gupta has spent about 14 years being the most interesting person in someone else’s film or series. But with her debut directorial short Aasmani — written, directed and produced under her newly launched banner Sayani Gupta Movies — she turned from artiste to architect of her own life.
As OTT budgets tighten, roles get less meaty and AI rewrites what creativity means, Gupta is betting on both indie cinema and herself.
All Aboard
In the span of a single week in April earlier this year, Gupta collected a REMI Special Jury Award at WorldFest Houston and a Best Short Film audience choice award at the Indie Meme Film Festival in Austin — both for Aasmani, her debut as writer, director and producer — and was honoured by Harvard’s South Asian Association as their Person of the Year. She also missed the entire press cycle for Glory, her Netflix show directed by Karan Anshuman.
On top of that, Aasmani and Glory were shot almost simultaneously, their schedules overlapping into what she describes as “two weeks of complete anxiety on every person’s behalf.” There was a very real possibility she’d have to choose between the two. She didn’t. She sorted the dates, showed up for both, and came home to a death in the family. The train kept moving.
Glorious Company
Anshuman — whom she previously worked with on Prime Video’s Inside Edge — had told her about three years ago that he was writing something for her. “It’s always really nice to actually get a part that somebody wrote with you in mind. I mean, it would have sucked if I didn’t like the script,” she says with a laugh, adding that she’s quite glad that she did the show.
What she is less glad about is the broader state of the OTT landscape that shows such as Glory or Four More Shots Please! exist within. She isn’t particularly optimistic when asked whether the golden era of complex, interesting roles for actors like her is fading. “There are roles,” she says, “But there is a dearth of variety. And there is a dearth of in-depth exploration of what different kinds of stories can be, what different kinds of characters can be. I don’t think this is the best of what we have and what we can do.”
She also bemoans the fact that there is less creative freedom now, especially in terms of what is being greenlit. “There is definitely a conversation that needs to be had, an open conversation, a more democratic conversation.”
She recalls when OTT started, how creative freedom was a given. “There was nobody telling you what to make. So, your voice was authentic,” she says.
She hasn’t pitched to platforms herself, she points out, and knows she’s a cog in a larger wheel, with an actor’s view. But what she hears from makers is telling. “Everything looks similar. Everything is edited similarly. Even from costume and production design, they all seem very similar. Every story can’t have the same pacing, can’t be shot similarly.”
Building Boldly
The answer, for Gupta, has been to stop waiting and start building. Sayani Gupta Movies — her production house — was not a pivot so much as an inevitability. She is also producing two foreign co-productions, one of which is a rom-com. The range is deliberate. “I don’t believe in putting myself in a box. I’ve never really fit in,” she says. “Only recently, in the last two years, I’ve realised that maybe I’m never supposed to.”
At a time when filmmakers are chasing the blockbuster, Gupta is still betting on indie cinema, a space she feels as comfortable in as any commercial venture. “I have always had my feet in both the commercial space and the indie space and I have never thought, ‘this or that’. I think both are possible, because ultimately, you’re telling stories.”
That passion for telling stories is what makes for better cinema, Gupta believes. “I don’t think indie cinema can exist without love and passion,” she says, “because anything which is not formulaic or project-driven, anything which is story-driven or art-driven, will need that softer touch, that sensitivity to mount the film.”
Shooting Aasmani took her across Maharashtra, recce-ing for over a year, finding locations where nobody had ever rolled a camera. “Till you have made a film,” she says, “you don’t know what making a film actually entails.” Anshuman asked her after she came back from the U.S. whether the experience had given her more respect for directors. She replied, “No. I only have more respect for myself.”
The more revealing thing, she says is about exposure, about how directing makes you naked in a way that acting, for all its vulnerability, doesn’t quite do. “People can see how you think, how you are, how you feel, what your fault lines are. Everything,” she says.
Analogue Always
There are mostly two responses from the film industry when it talks about AI: Performative enthusiasm or straight-up terror and a refusal to use it. Gupta is just wary. “It definitely is scary because, how can you put humans and ethics in one bracket?” she asks. “I have lived my life with ethics, but it’s not the lay of the land, unfortunately.”
She reiterates that the whole point of creating art is imperfection. “It is in the imperfections that beauty lies. And that’s what makes a piece — a painting, a music piece or a film — it’s that human error which makes it what it is.”
She writes pen to paper. She made Aasmani on analogue. When people suggested that she use AI for the music, she declined. “I think there is a little bit of time before that happens,” she says.
Larger Lens
Harvard’s South Asian Association honoured her, in their words, for ‘challenging conventions and bringing depth, boldness and authenticity to contemporary narratives.’ Gupta is candid about what South Asian representation still lacks though. “Coming away from stereotypes,” she says. “The way skin colour, a beard or dyed hair continues to dictate not just casting but the kind of humanity a character is allowed to have on screen. As a society, we are constantly stereotyping looks.”
South Asia, she points out, is usually collapsed into a single export. “People think of South Asia, they think of Bollywood. There are so many kinds of films being made. So many other countries which are part of South Asia.” The region’s economic footprint, she says, is undeniable. The cultural one should match.
Asked what she wants Sayani Gupta Movies to mean a decade from now, she is clear. “Stories that evoke, stories of hope, stories that stand this test of time.”
But the more unexpected thing, she says, is about children. She wants to make films they can watch — not dumbed down, condescending content, but the kind of thing she grew up on, where adults and children sat in the same room and both walked away with something.
In Austin, she invited children to a screening of Aasmani and watched them stay in their seats, engaged, laughing. “For children, especially that generation now, to sit through a film and actually be engaged? I don’t know. I was quite relieved, honestly.”
She was always going to be the most interesting person in the room. She’s just finally building the room herself, brick by brick. For Gupta, the train is still moving.