Wedding Season: 7 Years in the Making with Shiwani Srivastava
Rom-com-versations is an interview series with people from the entertainment industry discussing all things rom-coms.
Hi Meet Cuties,
This week I had the pleasure to chat with Shiwani Srivastava, best known for being the writer on the hit rom-com on Netflix, WEDDING SEASON. Shiwani got her bachelor’s degrees in English and Journalism from New York University and a master’s degree in South Asian Studies from the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She writes screenplays examining relationships, family dynamics, and immigrant experiences through the lens of comedy. Shiwani has received numerous awards and recognitions for the WEDDING SEASON script, including winning the ScreenCraft Comedy Competition in 2018, and I’m so excited to share our conversation with you.
💕 Naomi: What is your favorite rom-com and why?
💚 Shiwani: That's like choosing between children... My answer has changed over the years, but lately I would say MOONSTRUCK. Aside from the fact that Cher and Nick Cage are amazing in it, I always loved how it put the two romantic leads in the context of their Italian families, their Italian worlds, and portray how they're thriving, loving, and meddling. It's such a robust world aside from a compelling love story because they're not just existing in a vacuum, which happens in many rom-coms. To me, they feel like real people who dealt with real life and cultural complications, similar to what I have dealt with. In many ways, it's always been the rom-com that I related to the most, especially growing up. Because of the humor and cultural specificity, it reminded me a lot of my Indian American community in Jersey.
💕 Naomi: I love that movie because apart from being funny, it has a point of view. That's something I've realized is so important to the rom-coms I gravitate towards. When it feels generic, it doesn't connect for me. When you care about the character because of their point of view, it's so much more powerful. Speaking of Jersey, I'd love to hear about your childhood, where you live now, and what your journey was into the entertainment industry.
💚 Shiwani: I am based in Seattle now, but I grew up in New Jersey, which I think a lot of people have gleaned from WEDDING SEASON. It was actually a very Italian town, about 30 miles outside of New York. I did go to NYU for undergrad, but I didn't go to film school. It's not because I didn't want to or didn't love movies-- I always dreamed of working on movies-- but I didn't feel like film school was for people like me. There weren’t many brown people following that path. So, I ended up studying journalism and English. I must have done every other kind of writing besides screenwriting in my career. I was in book editing, journalism, copywriting, you name it. I finally started getting the courage to pursue this dream of screenwriting when I turned 30. Ten years ago, I was living in San Francisco and I got an email about a screenwriting class. It was being taught by Terrel Seltzer, who wrote the classic rom-com, ONE FINE DAY. Immediately, I thought, "This is a sign." Of course, I took the class, and it totally changed my life. She was an amazing teacher, I got a great writer's group out of it, and I started some of the early scenes for WEDDING SEASON in that class. From there I was hooked. I realized it's what I'd been wanting to do all along. I started taking online classes through UCLA so that I could actually turn this idea into a finished script. It was crazy because I still had my freelance copywriting job and I had twins in the middle of all that. But, I just kept at it as I had the time. It was a seven year journey between taking that class and the script finally placing in the ScreenCraft Comedy Contest. That is what opened the world to me because I had no connections in LA. Through that contest, they put WEDDING SEASON in the hands of the producer, who brought it to Netflix, and they introduced me to my manager who got me an agent. It's funny, you never know when you're going to have that one piece of luck that opens doors for you. But that was mine.
💕 Naomi: That's incredible! Did you ever have that aha moment where you thought, "This could be really big?"
💚 Shiwani: When I started writing it, I was at that stage in my life where all my friends were getting married, and a couple were breaking off engagements. Asha is really based on a couple friends who had just broken off engagements and both their moms were asking them, "So when are you getting engaged again?" It was totally based on real stuff that was happening in my life. I felt I was more like Priya because my husband is Taiwanese American and both our parents were driving us crazy about the wedding. It was too much pressure and I didn't want any of it, so I felt like it was reflective of my real life. As time went on, I got further and further away from the script and realized I wanted to do more with the characters of the parents. Initially, it started with Asha and Ravi's point of view, but some of those MOONSTRUCK family elements came over into the storyline as I got older, had kids, and could see it more from the parents' perspective. There's some benefit to having all this time to think about the script. When I first started writing, I didn’t really think it would get made, but I started to have some hope because Mindy Kailing was on TV at that point and Kal Penn was everywhere. There was so much more brown talent on screen that I started to believe it had a shot, though I didn't know what, when, or how. The year it got second in that contest, CRAZY RICH ASIANS was in the theater. To enter a script in a contest, you have to believe it has a shot, and knowing that that movie was getting all this buzz and people thought it was going to be a huge success had a big impact on me.
💕 Naomi: The industry was getting small glimpses of what diverse content could look like. I truly feel like this summer was the summer of POC hits, and I think WEDDING SEASON was part of that. Now, I'm starting to hear conversations about, "Why don't we have South Asian fantasy stories?" There are so many different tropes and genres that can be tapped into. That leads me to my next question: in WEDDING SEASON we have Nick, who is the husband of the protagonist's sister, and his role serves to bring comic relief. There's a lot of things about Indian culture that get brought to life through Nick. Oftentimes before this movie, we saw South Asian people playing the comic relief character, rather than being the main characters with a white person serving as comic relief. You flipped the script here and I'm curious how the character Nick came about.
💚 Shiwani: The way you phrased it is very astute because in very early versions of the script, he was actually Nikhil, an Indian character. When we started seriously rewriting the script for Netflix, I worked really closely with the director on it and he's not South Asian. It was really helpful to have his point of view because there were so many things that the cast, the producer, and I, being South Asian, took for granted as just things we know. Having him step in and say, "I don't get this," made us realize that we needed a character in the script who could say that so that we had a natural way of explaining the customs and culture of this world in a way where the audience gets them too. On top of that, it was great for me personally because my husband is not South Asian and I felt the same way when trying to fit in with his Taiwanese American family. There is a common feeling when you marry into a family of wanting so badly to fit in and be a part of the culture. Many of us Indian Americans know what that's like either from our partners or from our own experiences. We really wanted to show what that's like. It was fun to have somebody who loves Indian culture so wholeheartedly. Nick was meant to be comic relief, I think that's a credit to Sean Kleier because he's so funny. Even lines that I wrote which were not necessarily meant to be funny, he delivered in a way that was hilarious, but also had a lot of heart. You're rooting for him because this poor guy just wanted to belong. He brought a whole new element to Nick’s character that I hadn't even pictured.
💕 Naomi: On the same topic of culture, something else this movie brought up for me which I think most Indian Americans think about is balancing individual needs– which is something that's really prevalent in Western cultures– and societal/family expectations–- which can be good and bad in different ways. I think Asha's character was an incredible balance of those two and brought to light this idea that a lot of Indian Americans and probably a lot of other first generation, mixed culture people grapple with. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached that through Asha's character?
💚 Shiwani: That's a really great point and it is definitely the overarching theme, and Ravi grapples with it too. Ravi in many ways is my husband because he was a successful musician for years, and later went back to do computer science. He had a similar struggle between wanting to do right by his parents who sacrificed so much for him, but also having his own dreams. In some ways, his story was very much an inspiration. Asha in many ways resembles me and my friends. We were all very career driven and were pushed to study hard and succeed, but when it comes to marriage and family, suddenly it all takes a back seat. I really wanted her to be career driven, not in an over the top way we see in many rom-coms, but in a real and relatable way. I really wanted her to be messy, complicated, and figuring her shit out because that's the way we all were. Women don't want a rom-com lead who's waiting for her knight in shining armor or who's willing to give up her career. It was really important to me that Asha be those things and experiencing the complications of family. The thing that I found really interesting is that she faces a struggle because she can either stay with her family and her community who she loves and have a pretty good life, or she can pursue this promotion and go to London and leave it behind for a better life. What I realized was that parallels the choice her parents would've made as immigrants who came to America. There are sacrifices with both choices and I wanted Asha's journey to ultimately show that you can be both; you can love your family fiercely and be loyal and still go after what you want in life. THAT Is love.
💕 Naomi: I love that because that's something that was definitely missing from like the rom-com zeitgeist. There was a moment where I asked, "What is she going to choose?" Even though we love the predictability of rom-coms emotionally, it was really nice to be waiting for the drop. In the process of writing the screenplay and working with Netflix, was there anything unique or surprising about the process?
💚 Shiwani: My takeaway is a really positive one. You always hear that screenwriters get kicked aside, producers take over your movie and do whatever they want, and that you have to fight and stick up for your script. But I realized, if you're working with the right people, that giving into the collaborative process actually makes your movie better. Seeing how everybody's point of view made the movie better was really fascinating. Especially as a writer who's been alone with this for years, at first you're very defensive when you get notes from executives, producers, and directors. But when you give into it, you can see that everybody wants to make it better. Seeing the end result of what each person brought to the table was amazing and completely the opposite of what I expected. If you want to be in this industry, you have to collaborate; no one piece happens in isolation. If you want a movie to come to life, the actors have to own their character and the director has to feel like a piece of them is in the movie. It's like letting your child go out into the world. It was really amazing and surprising to see how good it felt to let it go and let it become its own thing.
💕 Naomi: That's amazing. I do think we hear the horror stories more often than not, so it's nice to hear when things actually go well and the collaboration is easy. You have an animated feature coming out called DIYA, which is a mythology based fantasy adventure honing in on the folklore of India. Can you give Meet Cute audiences a sneak peek into this project?
💚 Shiwani: I'll tell you as much as I can! The studio is Reel FX and they actually have this great movie called BOOK OF LIFE that preceded COCO. They wanted to make something similar that takes you into a world of Indian folklore. So it's in that same vein, but it's going to be its own story. My friend, who was a professor for years and an amazing researcher, and I are diving into it together. They brought on Nitya Mehra as the director who was the showrunner of MADE IN HEAVEN. We have her sensibility too in forming the script, which is great and I'm enjoying the collaborative process all over again. They also brought on Kunal Nayyar, from THE BIG BANG THEORY, as the executive producer. It's kind of just coming together now. I can't say too much more than that, but I think people will be excited about it.
💕 Naomi: That's awesome. Indian folklore hasn't really seen mainstream media yet. I grew up reading children's books about it and I think it's gonna be so fun to see it merge with what is popular today. Are there any other projects that you're working on?
💚 Shiwani: The producer from WEDDING SEASON, Swati Shetty, and I are working on a script together. It is another comedy and we're super excited about it. There's a script I'm working on for Paramount, which is my first studio movie, and it’s also a comedy. Then, I'm working on a pilot with Gunpowder & Sky and my friend who I've been co-writing with that's in the fantasy space. I’m trying to do things in different genres and see what happens. Nothing official yet because these things take time to set up, but I'm hopeful for something just as magical as WEDDING SEASON.
I hope you enjoyed this rom-com-versation! Be sure to watch WEDDING SEASON streaming now on Netflix!
Stay tuned for my next Rom-com-versation.
xx,
Naomi