Being born and raised in Chicago by a family from Kerala (South India) has definitely given me a unique perspective on the world. The first film I ever saw in my life was “Disney’s Dinosaur”, which had an ever-lasting effect on me. As a child, I was constantly obsessed with dinosaurs and started researching them at a young age, watching “Disney’s Dinosaur”, The Land Before Time, and the Jurassic Park movies on repeat. My first childhood dream was paleontology, and while that dream died quickly, my fascination with dinosaurs never ended.
In 2005, when I was in 5th grade, I got inspired to watch not only dinosaur movies, but also monster movies, like “King Kong” and “Godzilla”. These two cinematic icons led me to finally say, “I want to make movies”. All the way from middle school to high school to college and up until now, I was always known as the guy who never stops talking about monsters, dinosaurs, robots, and any characters that are not human. The films that continue to inspire me are “Transformers”, “Avatar”, the “Universal Monsters”, and any other film with amazing creature designs.
Non-human characters speak to me in a way human characters don’t. Non-human characters don’t live within the constraints of what a human can or can’t express. I remember the first time I ever cried watching a movie was at the ending of Peter Jackson’s King Kong in 2005. That film really showed me how to give life, feeling, and character development to a non-human character, and I wanted to achieve that in my work.
In my early childhood, I wasn’t even thinking about watching more South Asians on screen because I was so caught up in my love for monsters. However, when I was in college, I started volunteering for South Asian film festivals and I really started to notice how little people who looked like me were represented on screen.
I started focusing more of my work towards representing South Asians, as well as other minorities, while still maintaining my love of monsters. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago in 2016, I made a short film called “The Color of Me”, about a woman with a magical curse that her skin changes color and she turns into 5 different races, and an adopted African-American falls in love with her. The film was a chance for me to explore racism and colorism through a fairy tale romance perspective. The film received many awards in the festival circuit, including “Best Original Concept” at the Las Vegas Black Film Festival. The film is now available on Amazon Prime.
Shortly after releasing “The Color of Me”, I moved to Los Angeles and used my education and film festival experience to get a job at Paramount Plus. After 5 years of navigating the LA scene and moving up in the world of filmmaking, I decided it was time to finally make my dream project, an Indian Dinosaur movie.
I partnered with famed Mumbai-based author Vaishali Shroff (author of “The Adventures of Padma and a Blue Dinosaur”) to write the short film “Rajasaur”, the first-ever short film to feature dinosaurs discovered in India. Right when the COVID-19 pandemic started, I self-funded, produced, directed the short film, which is now available on Disney Hotstar.
My upcoming goals for the future are taking classes in Special Effects Make-Up, booking more commercial acting roles, producing a web-series, and hoping to produce a feature film similar to the monster films that inspired me, with a South Asian cast. Something I have recently learned about myself was noticing how persistent I can be with my goals, and that is a trait I have kept to keep pursuing and keep inspiring for my art.
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