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Speaking at the Cannes Lions conference on Wednesday, Priyanka Chopra Jonas shared her thoughts on becoming a producer, her desire to expand her career in the U.S. and cited the low-budget horror smash hit “Obsession”
as a marker of how barriers to entry for talent and filmmakers have fallen.
“I feel like if you have an idea, shoot it, put it on YouTube, and it can become ‘Obsession,’ the movie that just came out,” Chopra Jonas said. “What a wonderful time to be an entertainer, to be in the entertainment business, because ideas are your currency.”
That wasn’t always the case. Chopra Jonas, a Bollywood superstar who has been building a career in Hollywood for the last decade, said she faced some challenges when she got into film because she had no connections. “My parents were doctors, so none of us had any idea how to navigate film,” she said.
“It used to be such a niche industry when I first started. If you wanted to get into filmmaking, you had to figure out what department you wanted to be in,” she said.
She also recalled being told early in her career that Indian cinema would “never be as global as Hollywood because we’re not English-language, and not everybody understands whatever language our movies might be in, whether Hindi, Telugu, Marathi or anything else,” she said.
She said she started her production house to support “new filmmakers, or filmmakers who have great ideas but don’t have the ability to open doors that I may be able to open.”
Chopra Jonas, who’s coming off a pair of streaming hits “Citadel” and “Heads of State,” also spoke candidly about wanting to take her English-language career to the next level.
“In my Hindi-language career, I’ve worked with all the best filmmakers and the best actors, I’ve told amazing stories and done a variety of genres. Whereas in America, in Hollywood, in my English-language work, I haven’t really done that as much.”
She said her “next reinvention” is “figuring out how, in (her) English-language work” she can bring that “kind of variety to my characters that I have been able to do in India.”
She credited streaming services — and the pandemic — for pushing audiences to explore content from around the world.
“My mom loves Korean dramas. She would never have had access to those if it wasn’t for both of those factors,” Chopra Jonas said. “Or she’ll watch an Iranian movie. Or look at ‘Squid Game’ when it became the phenomenon that it did, or ‘Parasite’ when it won best picture.”
She said those projects showed that non-English-language entertainment could no longer be treated as niche. She mentioned “Varanasi,” a project which she is currently working on that shot in Telugu, a classical language spoken in Southern India, and will be dubbed in almost 200 languages.
During the Cannes Lions conversation, she also opened up about her life since getting married and becoming a mother, admitting that her “life has changed tremendously.”
“Your priorities really change. I don’t just pack my bags and go off for a movie anymore. I don’t do five films a year. I don’t travel the way I used to. I’m really, really selective about the time I spend and who I spend it with… I’m navigating working-mom life. I have so much more respect for my mother now.”
