Kiran Rao on How ‘Lost Ladies’ Evolved from a Screenplay Competition to India’s Oscar Pick

On a sidewalk somewhere near the IndieWire offices, there’s a plaque with a quote from Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Of the many plaques in the area around the New York Public Library, this is the one that “Lost Ladies” (aka “Laapataa Ladies” as it’s also known) director Kiran Rao walked past on her way to our interview about the award-winning film that became India’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature.

“I thought that was so telling,” Rao said, about the plaque. “That’s one of our great strengths as a species, that we’re able to tell stories, to imagine futures, and it makes me really excited as a director to be part of that.”

Rao has been working consistently in the storytelling business since the late ’90s, when she was an assistant director on Ashutosh Gowariker’s “Lagaan” (the most recent Indian film to be shortlisted at the Oscars, over 20 years ago). She continued as an A.D. and producer throughout the 2000s, but her last and only feature as director, “Dhobi Ghat,” came out in 2011. Like any director driven by story, she was waiting for the right one; it just took longer than expected, and Rao admits she was content to bide her time, still producing and raising her son.

“My interest, like I suppose any director, is in a story that at once is extremely personal, but also something that’s universally relatable and speaks to something that we experience as a society or as people,” Rao said. “This story really gave me that opportunity, which a lot of the stories that I was writing earlier weren’t doing yet.”

“Lost Ladies” evolved from a script called “Two Brides” by Biplab Goswami, which caught producer Aamir Khan’s attention in a screenplay competition. Khan and Rao are longtime producing partners, and he brought it to her directly.

“It was just such an exciting idea, and it had all the bones for a great adventure story, but also this journey of self-discovery, of a lot of uncomfortable home truths being explored,” Rao recalled. “And all in all, a great ride, so I thought this should be my next film. It was waiting to be made.”

Rao said the original script had “all the bones of a great story,” but she wanted to complicate the plot and characters further, as well as amplify the comedy and satire. For that, she collaborated with screenwriter Sneha Desai, on “how we could make a really fun story, a subtle but powerful critique of intense patriarchy in Indian society.”

That’s “Lost Ladies” in a nutshell, and Rao’s recipe worked; since it hit Netflix in April (with the Hindi title “Laapataa Ladies”), the film hit over 17 million views, overtaking big budget films and massive celebrity starrers. The goal was always “to reach people and move them,” and “spark conversations and ideas,” but Rao is still endlessly humbled by the response.

“That’s the best thing any director could hear or feel,” she said. “I feel the love when I’m in a room. People now, in airports or anywhere I go, just want to come up to tell me how much they like the film. So many people said ‘My mum told me to watch this.’ I’m so grateful for that reaction, and, honestly, the fact that we’ve been able to connect with audiences in a really organic way and women have connected with this film in the in the exact way that I wanted them to. They feel seen, they feel heard, they feel like so many of the women that they know are represented in this film. I don’t think as a director, I could have asked for anything better.”

Commercial Indian cinema is known for victorious arcs and feel-good endings — the independent film scene less so, including Rao’s own “Dhobi Ghat.” But for “Lost Ladies,” Rao tapped into mainstream ethos to deliver a film that was sneakily progressive but never preachy. The emotionality and tenor of popular Hindi movies is what Rao believes has made them global hits.

“We leaned very much into the warmth and the tone of a mainstream, in that it was approachable and accessible and entertaining for everyone on the surface of it,” Rao said. “I felt the need to use that humor to disarm people while I was going to be talking about things that are otherwise difficult, whether it’s women’s education, freedoms and autonomy, gender roles, patriarchy — things that could be quite heavy.”

It was important for Rao and Desai to portray women who found liberation within their social reality — “the kind of need to explore themselves and explore what makes them happy” — because as the director pointed out, not everyone can up and leave a situation they don’t like. Jaya (Pratibha Ranta) doesn’t want to get married at all, but to study and work, while Phool (Nitanshi Goel) is genuinely content with her arranged husband, Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastav), and learns a thing or two about fending for herself after the women accidentally switch places on a train. “It’s never one formula for anyone, and the fact that Phool could find agency within the conventional constructs of marriage while Jaya was very clear that she wanted to go off and study and do her own thing were both equally valid routes for me, for any woman, to take,” Rao said.

It also inspired one of the film’s key visuals: the ghungat, or veil. The brides are switched because their wedding veils conceal their identity, one of them hidden and the other deliberately hiding. “It both conceals and reveals,” Rao said. “One uses it to kind of hide her identity, while the other goes from using it as the conventional veil to tying her first earnings. We wanted to show how a garment, which is often looked at as very regressive, is really up to a woman to define how she wants.”

Women’s empowerment drives the story of “Lost Ladies,” but also Rao’s work behind the camera. Along with Desai, she also worked with producer Jyoti Deshpande, editor Jabeen Merchant, and female assistants on the directing team. She’s a champion of Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” as well as the work of contemporaries like Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, Shonali Bose, Alankrita Srivastav, and “Santosh” director Sandhya Suri. On the international stage, she’s quick to praise Greta Gerwig and Justine Triet, and to urge gender parity in every department.

“We need a lot more women in the film industry,” Rao said. “We actively need to work towards having at least 50 percent of our crew… and even in terms of storytelling and stories and lead characters and characters that have some agency and some relevance in our films, we just need more interesting women, more women with shades and nuance and agency and autonomy.”

‘Lost Ladies’Aamir Khan Productions

During the shoot, Rao said she didn’t face any unusual challenges on “Lost Ladies.” Her main concern was “finding that balance and achieving something that was tonally quite fresh,” to be able to reconcile the film’s sometimes dramatic dialogue with a more naturalistic cadence and aesthetic. The actors — a mix of young, fresh faces and seasoned veterans — were instrumental in pulling that off.

“I thought it would be hard, but once I started working with actors and started hearing the pitch of their performance, and I was able to, in a way, conduct that performance orchestra… I felt like I could arrive at a tone that was natural for me,” she said.

On a shoot that included multiple COVID cases, filming at active train stations, and regularly holding for cattle sounds (“We had to have assistants ready to feed them when we said ‘Lock it up’ so that they would be chewing through the take”), Rao feared she wouldn’t get enough coverage of her brilliant performers and the smaller notes in their work.

“But one of the joys of it was actually working with all of them and having their more sort of their organic reactions to things,” she recalled. “We ultimately ended up having a two-camera setup, so I was able to capture a lot more, and the joy of working with actors who are good at what they do and who are happy to go where you take them. So something that I was really worried about actually turned out to be one of the great joys of this process.”

As gratifying as it is to see the response from Indian audiences, the film’s TIFF premiere in 2023 revealed its international appeal. Rao sat down with IndieWire in November, after the film was released in Japan, with forthcoming plans for China. Academy screenings are going well, and “have given this film a whole new lease of life.” The cast and crew are delighted to keep sharing a piece of art that they truly believe in, with “a whole country of people waiting and watching.”

Rao hopes it will continue to resonate internationally, and she’s not about to wait another 13 years before helming another feature.

“I’m feeling incredibly impatient, in that I have to stop myself from thinking, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!'” she said. “I have such exciting things ready to make. I wake up every morning feeling incredibly restless and impatient, and I want to just literally jump into the director’s chair again. It’s already been two years since we shot this film, so I’m so ready for my next.”

“Lost Ladies,” India’s official Oscars entry, is streaming on Netflix as “Laapataa Ladies.”