When I got into film school, it really formed a sense of who I am and my sense of feeling like an outsider. If there was some greater purpose to do this, it would be so that future generations - my kids or my sister's kids - would grow up seeing themselves in their media culture in a way that I didn't. If The Mindy Project or Master of None were on when I was growing up, I wonder if I would be interested in doing this at all

When I was in film school at USC, I wrote my thesis script about a woman on Wall Street - specifically a woman who used to work at Morgan Stanley, sort of based on her life. Through that process, I did some research.

It is my sense of exclusion from representation that made me want to be a part of figuring out if we could make a difference.

Through this experience [of makimg movies], I recognized what an extraordinary set of personality traits it takes to be able to succeed in that world, and I was really drawn to the character work we could build with actors as a result.

My dad is an engineer by trade but worked a lot with the people in the Indian film industry when I was growing up. He started out distributing films from India here in the '70s because there was no place to go for people to watch movies from the homeland. So he developed a network of actors, writers, directors, and musicians that became his friends and that he would tour around the country with, doing stage shows of the musical numbers from their films.

I'd like them [people] to leave thinking about the challenges women face in the workforce, but more importantly to really feel the emotional highs and lows of those challenges - to have really experienced that unsettling place where ambition crosses over into something else entirely.

I think it was the same thing that really makes the premise of this film [Women of Wall Street] compelling: the idea of a woman negotiating issues around power and money, which are two things that have historically been denied to women. To see a woman operate successfully, but still find those barriers a result of that historical and systemic bias in her pursuit to the top, is a really interesting struggle.