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.

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."]

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.

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.

You don't necessarily need to go to film school to learn that part of it. But what I valued was that it gives you that incubation and time to figure out who you are, what kind of stories you want to tell, and how you want to forge your path.

I always knew I wanted to make films, but just didn't quite know how to start. I was making little short films with my friends but I wasn't quite sure how to put those pieces together for myself.