Priya Venkataraman

Priya Venkataraman stage managed off-Broadway for six years, two and a half of them on a musical that ran eleven times a week, and she wrote The Understudies about the room she is describing. She came to film late and sideways: she was hired to keep the schedule on a low budget feature and ended up rewriting scenes on set, which the director noticed. She writes fast and revises in rehearsal, casts out of theatre rather than film, and runs her sets on stage manager time, which her crews say is the calmest thing about working with her. Month to Month was shot in her own apartment on Nostrand Avenue on the last Saturday before she moved out of it. She does not own a camera and has no interest in owning one. She works with the editor Sasha Mireles and the producer Gita Menon, and casts Reema Bhatt in everything.