Director Varsha Bharath on her film 'Bad Girl' and industry sexism
Navigating a male centric industry, the ‘Bad Girl’ director says the crew’s energy changes when there are more women on it
Varsha Bharath, Vetrimaaran’s longtime assistant director, debuted with Bad Girl, an intimate character study from action hero-obsessed Tamil cinema. Bharath’s coming of-age story follows Ramya, played by Anjali Sivaraman, a young woman navigating strict family expectations and societal norms in her search for love and autonomy. Produced by Vetrimaaran and Anurag Kashyap, the film premiered at Rotterdam in February, releasing theatrically on 5 September in India.
While it got the best Asian film award at the Rotterdam film festival, Bad Girl sparked controversy in home state over accusations of negative portrayals of Brahmins, escalating to the Madras high court ordering the teaser’s removal in July. Lounge caught a private screening of the Hindi dub days before release and met Bharath, 34, in Mumbai shortly after. Edited excerpts from the interview.
You said during a private screening how men have been making bad movies for over a century, so if people think that your movie is bad, you don’t mind, you still want them to watch it. It felt like you were allowing yourself the freedom to fail.
Ever since I was an AD, there was always this need to be better than all the boys. In 2011, when I started out, there weren’t a lot of women. I see that pattern among many women, this fear of being bad... Across professions, women do carry this little bit of self-doubt: “I need to be good, I need to earn this." Whereas men just take it for granted that they can tell stories, whether good or bad. When there’s a woman winning an award in cinema, suddenly everyone talks about whether she deserves it or whether she’s got it because she’s a woman. We often do not ask these questions about men. Because institutions built by men, for men, are assumed worthy by default.
So, were you able to release yourself from that pressure while making the film?
No, never. Every decision I made came from anxiety, not confidence. We were constantly working on the edit. And the beauty of cinema is let’s say something is not great on paper, you can always shoot it well. And if something goes wrong while shooting, there’s editing, post-production, sound-mixing, and music. There’s so much you can do to save a scene. That also means you have multiple opportunities to be self-critical along the way.
But you wrote the screenplay in about 10 days, right?
Yes, I finished it in under two weeks. It was easy for me to write because the story was so personal. Though some details and the order of things changed, the essence remained the same. The three-act structure and all those technical details that people talk about, they come naturally to us because of the sheer number of films we’ve watched. You’ve also subtitled over a 100 projects.
Did your subtitling career help with the economy of words in your screenplay?
Yes, I think so. Though I always looked at subtitling as a money gig. ADs are severely underpaid. I was with one of the better directors who paid quite well, so I was being paid above average by Tamil industry standards, but I did require an additional revenue stream because I lived alone and supported myself. So I would always say that I’m just doing it for the money. In hindsight I really treasure my time as a subtitler.
Did you feel the pressure of having big names like Anurag Kashyap and Vetrimaaran attached to the film?
No pressure at all, they were kind and non-interfering. My only real pressure was commercial success. Unfortunately, the film didn’t do well commercially.
Would you attribute the commercial outcome to the online backlash against the movie’s teaser?
Yes, partly. The next time someone says “any publicity is good publicity," I’m going to strongly disagree with them. There are just so many more men going to the theatre—you just need a portion of them to show up. There’s strength in numbers and we, as women, do not have that. A lot of women still don’t have the luxury to go to theatres to watch a movie. Ideally I would have liked for mothers and daughters to watch this film together. Recently a friend of mine told his mother to watch the film, and she said how everybody was likening it to soft pornography. Also the title made them believe it’s a film about rebellion. Whereas it’s just a soft film.
Did that make you wonder if you should have changed the title?
I can’t imagine any universe where I could have done these things differently and had a different outcome because these are the very forces we are trying to fight. I don’t think you can be subservient to a system and still be subversive. There’s no realm where this could have had a fortunate ending because I would have had to compromise and it wouldn’t have made sense to make this film that way. I set out to make a warm, light film, but it got branded as controversial. That hurt. Still, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Any learnings from this episode for future projects?
What I learned from this is to be okay with the fact that people who’ve built the system are not going to welcome you with open hands. It was naive and foolish of me to expect that people are going to turn around and suddenly embrace something that they have resisted all along.
You had a largely female team. How did that affect the filmmaking process?
I learnt how to work with women only after making this film. I have no exam ples of how to be a woman and a boss because I’ve never had a woman boss. Nor have I had a woman reporting to me. And it’s not just about having women, it’s about having women from different backgrounds. Hiring women also comes with higher logistical costs—transport, safety, accommodation—but it was a conscious decision. You’re already making something on a budget, so it was a challenge. I started examining my own internalised misogyny when I had women reporting to me.
Did it ever cross your mind as to why go through all that trouble?
It didn’t cross my mind. Having all these women made my film better. It made the environment so much softer, gentler. It wasn’t just the crew, but also the actors. I have only worked in big hero films. And this was a woman in the lead. I had my own feelings of “are people not listening to me because I’m a woman". Arranging my own feelings took a little bit of time. We had disagreements, bad days, but we stuck through them.
Did the female crew influence the visual language?
My brief to my crew was we do not need to beautify this person. She’s already extremely attractive. But we’re telling the story of a girl who feels like a loser. The objective was not to make something aspirational. There are women who think their job in the world is to be attractive. We needed to not have a male gaze.
What do you hope women across ages take away from the film?
I want them to have a good time. There are not enough women stories being told that are just about fun. Most of them tend to be dramatic or sob stories. About trauma. Oppression. I wanted women to come to the theatres and realise our lives are cool and fun, and it’s okay to make mistakes. Growing up is realising that nothing is such a big deal. I want all of them to carry that lightness in our being.
Who inspires your visual language?
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette deeply influenced me. Her irreverence in telling delicate stories resonates with me.
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