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 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.

Creating a portrait of a female point of view in an environment that we've pretty much exclusively understood through a male perspective - "Wall Street," "Wolf of Wall Street," "Arbitrage" - etc. was beyond exciting for me. It felt downright necessary. And I felt really inspired by Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas' agenda in telling these types of unique, feminist stories. [Both of them produced and acted in "Equity."]

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.

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.

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.