Newly released on Netflix and acquired by Ava DuVernay’s Array, Definition Please is a fresh breath of South Asian realism.
Sujata Day’s debut feature film, Definition Please, follows former spelling bee champion Monica Chowdry (played by Day) as she struggles to find focus in her life and navigates family relationships. This film tackles themes of the model minority myth, grief and mental health– all of which come together in an accurate depiction of the modern first-generation South Asian household.
It was a quiet weekend morning when I sat down for a virtual chat with Day, and the conversation we had dives deep into the film, starting at the very beginning.
“I was inspired by me winning my fourth grade spelling bee,” Day began, reminiscing on where the idea for Definition Please came from. “I went on to regionals and I lost in the first round on the word radish. I spelled it with two D's instead of one, which was devastating. And I always remember that moment.
“Fast forward to 2015– I was in a comedy sketch writing class at UCB Upright Citizens Brigade, and we had to write sketches pretty much every single week. One of my sketches was titled ‘Where Are They Now? Spelling Bee Winners?’ And if you Google them or look them up, the spelling bee winners are all doing great things. They're working at NASA, they are designing robots, they're winning World Poker tours. I thought it would be funny if the punchline of my sketch was that one of these former spelling bee champions grows up into a young woman and really doesn't accomplish much and doesn't live up to her potential and is still living at home and kind of putting around her hometown.”
Next year Day did a Sundance Screenwriting Lab with a different script and the following year attended the film festival as a Sundance Influencer. This was the catalyst behind making Definition Please.
“My friend Justin Chon’s film, Gook, was premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. I went to the premiere of Gook and was completely blown away by the movie. I loved it so much! I talked to him at his afterparty and I asked him how he got it made. He said, ‘I just raised money from my friends and family, and we shot it ourselves.’ I said, OK, cool, that's what I'm going to do. So I started writing the feature film version of Definition Please, based on that four page sketch that I had written a few years before.”
After a serendipitous turn of events, Day found herself with a huge cheque in her hands, and she didn’t think twice about what she would do with the money.
“I took all that money and put it into my movie. After that, to everyone that I would have coffee with and lunch with, I would say, ‘Hey, I'm raising money for my movie, do you or any of your friends or family members want to put in some money?’ That's how I raised the rest of the money and we shot Definition Please in the summer of 2019, and that was it.
Day drew inspiration for her own indie film from films she’s grown up with, such as The Skeleton Twins, The Savages and Duplass Brothers movies. But there was a missing piece in the genre that Day aimed to fill.
”When I was watching all of these movies, I noticed that they the they were all being told from one point of view. I decided I want to make a movie like [these] with our faces on the screen with people that you don't normally see in these situations, tackling grief and mental health and and the model minority myth and all of these things that that seem to be universal subjects, but that are only told from one point of view.
“I think life isn't perfect, and I made a movie about imperfect human beings that go through a lot of stuff– you go through a lot of ups and downs and it's a roller coaster. I wanted to to be grounded and authentic to what we really go through, especially the mental health aspect of it. I didn't want to sensationalize that or exploit that in any way. I just wanted to [show that] this is what people live with when you have mental health issues and this is what the people around that person also feel.”
With a message this strong, acting out the characters is another challenge which the team was able to perfectly execute.
“Those scenes weren't very hard to shoot because we had worked on them beforehand. We had talked about the characters. And then once we got there in that moment to shoot the scenes, I mean, we're a low budget indie film. You don't have a lot of time to work up to your emotion, you know, you just have to bring it on on the take. We were only doing two or three takes per scene. And so Ritesh, who played Sonny, he just killed it. And so Anna Kaja, who plays J.R., and I just reacted to whatever he was giving us.
The film manages to realistically depict mental health while reshaping South Asian representation at the same time.
“Once I got [to Los Angeles], it was really disappointing [to see] the things that I was auditioning for. I would have to do an accent or I would have to wear a certain outfit, or they would have me wear a hijab, even though I'm not Muslim.
“There were just a lot of stereotypical storylines. A lot of the roles that I was going for had similar plot line, which was always about arranged marriage. I grew up in a thriving first generation Indian-American community, and none of us went through arranged marriage!
“I just wanted to show us, as we were every day in real life– this is the stuff that we go through. I wanted to show a story where the central conflict was not about culture or heritage or background, and show that these first-generation kids appreciate their traditions and their background but they're also dealing with other stuff, just like other people in movies are allowed to do.”
There are good indie films, and Definition Please is a great one, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that it was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array and that you can now watch it on Netflix. I asked Day, ‘how did it feel?’
“I mean, amazing, it's the perfect home. I couldn't have imagined it. I think as a low-budget, indie filmmaker, you do the best you can and really hope that a small distributor picks up your movie and then it plays in one theatre in New York and one theater in L.A. for a couple of days. And then maybe like a hundred people have seen your movie and then it disappears.
“So to be picked up by Ava DuVernay's company Array and to immediately be on Netflix, it is a dream come true because it's available to millions of people now and they can watch it. And I'm getting a lot of fan messages about the film, and it's really heartwarming and amazing to see how the film has touched so many people around the world.”
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