Her movie "Period. End of Sentence." won an Oscar. But her very first movie was nearly taken off of theatres... Guneet Monga spoke to Brut about her Bollywood journey.
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00:00Celebrate your small wins
00:22I think I was 23 years old
00:25moved to Bombay
00:27with money from my neighbor and
00:30Decided to you know, I just meet so many people. I remember how it started was that my neighbor told me that they wanted to make
00:38Studio and make like films of you know, cute babies for their parents like commissioned work and I was like, okay
00:45What is your budget for the studio? And I remember him saying 50 lakhs. I was like, why don't you give me 50 lakhs?
00:50I will go to Bombay and make a feature film and I literally moved to Bombay
00:58And
01:00Just anybody and everybody I knew I was like I have 50 lakhs. Do you have a story?
01:04I would love to be a producer. So
01:08we had set up a company and done the paperwork and
01:11Learned how to you know produce a film and met an amazing director writer director called Subhash Kapoor
01:18Who also had access to similar money and we came together and made the first film in
01:242006 which released in 2007. It was a children's film children cricket film
01:40I just could not handle
01:43The situation where cinemas were just like take your movie back because nobody talks about cricket right now India lost the World Cup
01:49They were like purani picture. They don't be any lagging
01:54I
01:56Ended up actually going to Delhi and going to my school blue wells
02:00And I asked my principal if she would get all the kids for 50 rupees and see the film
02:05I ended up booking a cinema near our school, which was
02:09Sapna Cinema Hall and morning show 50 rupees per kid. I
02:13booked the whole cinema in 10,000 rupees it was a thousand seater and
02:1850 rupees per kid 50,000 show 10,000 to the theater owner 40,000 was mine
02:23I and the kids loved the film
02:26You know there I could hear them together breathe when you I hear a thousand kids on the last ball and you know
02:32So I ended up then going school to school and did some
02:37300 plus screenings and made all the money back took nine months of my life
02:41But that day I was like if I do not return the money of my first investor, how will I be a producer?
02:48I
02:58Yeah, one of my mentor has been Sameer Bungara
03:02It's the most incredible amazing generous person. I've ever come across
03:07And he always told me celebrate your small wins, you know, so
03:12And
03:14That's a piece of advice because we're so busy working and hustling and you know getting to the next day
03:21we forget to
03:23Celebrate ourselves. We forget to enjoy our little things