Director Megha Ramaswamy on asexual friendship of What Are The Odds: ‘I am sick and tired of teenagers being hypersexual’

What Are The Odds director Megha Ramaswamy talked to us about her new film, the need for good cinema for kids and Wes Anderson.

In 1990’s India, Bollywood rarely made films for the kids. It was usually a choice between sappy romance, mindless action or over-the-top drama. Megha Ramaswamy grew up at such a time and also grew tired of watching pretty women and handsome men dance around trees in the cinema halls. So when she made her feature film debut in 2020 with What Are The Odds, she made sure she made a movie that spoke to the young population in a way she had always wanted to be addressed.

Yashaswini Dayama and Karanvir Malhotra in What Are The Odds.

Talking to Hindustan Times about her new film, Megha revealed the true motivations behind why she made it the way she did. “I’ve always felt that I was dumbed down as a teenager growing up in the 90s, because there was no cinema for me. I was just watching adults running around trees, wearing nylon costumes. I never watched kids that were like me. I always had to look at cinema that was outside of India. Or there was the regular slum film about a slumdog’s story. What about that normalcy? That healthy normalcy that makes a teenager tap on their creativity with simplicity. I think that’s what I was aiming at,” she said.

Megha Ramaswamy (left) with her actors.

What Are The Odds, which released last month, on Netflix tells the story of two very different school kids--Vivek and Ashwin--who strike the unlikeliest friendship over the course of a day spent bunking an examination. They run into unexplained scenarios and crazy characters throughout their whimsical journey in a Mumbai that looks nothing like any of its many real life versions.

And the kids definitely seem appreciative of the movie, responding to the it with a deluge of fan art. “Because we have done this, kids have joined in. Kids are drawing and painting. You won’t believe the kind of fan art we are getting. So if a man peeping into a patch of beetroots can do that, then I think the answer is right there. The kids were thirsty for imagination and here’s a film that tells you to imagine, there are no boundaries, you’re young, you’re free. Please have fun,” Megha said.

Fan art for What Are The Odds.

Megha credits the film’s wide appeal and the genuineness to its young writer, Shreya Vaidya. She remembers how Shreya would prop herself up on her bed with her pink laptop, brimming with stories she wanted to tell. “It’s the most important thing about this film that it is voiced by a 17-year-old, which is why it is so sincere. Even if it is immature, Abhay (Deol, producer and actor) and I knew that we wanted immature voices to be taken into consideration as well. I mean she (Vivek) says ‘I want to serve coffee, be independent.’ And we all know that is not independence. This is the understanding of independence for a 14-year-old. Only Shreya could have brought around that,” she said.

Shows such as Sex Education and Riverdale may be all the rage right now but much like Shreya, Megha, too, was aiming at bringing the teenage experience to the screen in its more innocent form. And for that, she has her lead actors Yashaswini Dayama and Karanvir Malhotra to thank. “They treated these characters with so much affection and there wasn’t any over-smartness. Everything is becoming so over smart, hypersexual and quippy. They have that asexual chemistry between them which was beautiful. I am sick and tired of teenagers being hypersexual. They both are very attractive young kids and it’s very easy to have on set crushes. But the fact that they maintained that level of dignity towards their characters, never crossed a line is what worked for the film,” she said.

What Are The Odds is also a sight for sore eyes with its gorgeous wide shots, pastel, muted hues, unabashed display of pinks and yellows, and obsession with symmetry. Therefore it was no surprise that many saw a love for Wes Anderson peeking through the film. Megha takes it as a compliment. “I think great filmmakers leave their films for other filmmakers to also understand and celebrate. And Wes Anderson has celebrated India so much. So for a little girl from Pune is so influenced by his films that her first feature gets to draw so much from his films and that’s the fact that should be celebrated,” she said.

Left: Ben Stiller in The Royal Tennebaums; top right: A still from What Are The Odds; and bottom right: Jason Sudekis and others in SNL sketch What’s Up With That.

However, she realises that the comparison vs copy debate is not always gender neutral. “It never gets questioned when men who make gangster films, pay homage to Scorcese and lift scenes. I don’t wanna name these filmmakers but these are huge filmmakers ruling the gangster genre. But when they pay homage to gangster filmmakers who are glorifying rape and violence, nobody makes a comment about it. And here we are loving delicate frames and suddenly someone sees a red tracksuit and symmetry and says, ‘Wes Anderson’,” she says.

Megha also offered a clarification: the red tracksuit scene from her film is a homage to Saturday Night Live’s What’s Up With That sketch, not The Royal Tennebaums.

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