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'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.

Find other women to make movies with that have a shared bottom line. I did that with my first film and found an incredible partner in the inimitable writer/producer Laura Goode. I did it this time around by pairing with the forces of nature that are Amy Fox, Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas. All of these women share an activist's desire to be the change they want to see - and with that passion comes great purpose and great possibility.

When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I worked on an Indian soap opera that was my first exposure to production. But I quickly became disillusioned by acting and seeing that in the movies I loved and the TV I loved, no one looked like me. There weren't going to be any leading roles that would be interested in casting someone with my face.

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 applied [to film school] figuring, "I need to find some structure for myself. I need to find a way to figure out what kind of filmmaker I want to be." And that is what film school provides you with. It'll teach you the basics of how a production works and the technical side of how to put everything together, but you could also learn that by working on film sets.

I spent a year and a half working for an art fair. I worked as a post-production assistant for a documentary film company for a while. Then I worked at the Apple store because I wanted a discount to be able to buy new gear to edit things while I was figuring out whether or not I wanted to go to film school. Those were the main things.