As a 20-something, producer Guneet Monga Kapoor used to dye her hair grey and dress up in saris for meetings to appear old enough so that potential clients trust her with “a lot of money”.
With two Oscars, the most recent for Kartiki Gonsalves’ heartwarming documentary short The Elephant Whisperers, to her credit, she now hopes her career inspires more young producers to enter the Indian film industry.
Asked if there was any prejudice attached to being a woman producer in India, Guneet said it has more to do with age than gender. “I don’t think it is (about) women, but also as a producer, it is more challenging. It’s also age. Being young has been against me rather than being a woman,” she told PTI in an interview here.
“Being a young producer has raised a lot of questions that I had to fight in my 20s… I’m working now and (I hope) that my journey and my role here inspires more young producers to join the business,” Guneet added.
The Delhi-born producer moved to Mumbai in 2006 in order to pursue her dream of making movies. She worked as a line producer for “Say Salaam India”, “Rang Rasiya”, and “Dasvidaniya”, before launching her production banner Sikhya Entertainment in 2008.
Recalling the time she boarded Anurag Kashyap’s two-part cult film Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) as a producer, Guneet said people were unsure about her credibility due to her age. “I used to colour my hair white, I used to wear saris, prayed (to have) specs, which now I have…. But being young, how you internalise, how you show up because at the end of the day, you just need your work to be done,” she shared.
“You are handling a lot of money, so there’s definitely that kind of lens that I had to face that ‘She’s young, how will she handle? I was 26 years old when I produced ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, so, there’s definitely those kinds of questions,” Guneet said.
The producer said these things were never spoken aloud but one understood “the feeling in the room”. So, maybe you just show up in a different way, said the producer, who won her first Oscar in 2019 for the documentary short “Period. End of Sentence”.
According to Guneet, it’s a good time to be a producer. “More producers are needed today, like at the core of the content, where the content travels, how it is perceived, what is marketing, etc. We work in long formats, so from the time go to the end, the central role is that of a producer,” she explained.
Meanwhile, the upcoming projects of the producer include an action film, a series called Gyaarah Gyaarah, and a Netflix documentary on rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh.
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