Ashi Dua: Producer Ashi Dua calls her series BGDC ‘like kissing young girls in our country’ | exclusive
Updated on March 4, 2024 at 08:59 PM IST
In an exclusive chat with Zoom, the co-producer of the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series talked about how the show will capture the authentic boarding house experience in India.
Producer Ashi Dua calls her series BGDC ‘like kissing young girls in our country’ | exclusive
The first teaser #BGDC (which stands for Big Girls Don’t Cry) was published by Amazon Prime Video. The series, created by Nitya Mehra and co-produced by Ashi Dua and Karan Kapadia, will revolve around the strong bonds of sisterhood formed between young women who meet in a fictional boarding school. actor #BGDC Includes Pooja Bhatt, Zoya Hussain, Lovleen Misra, Mukul Chadda, Raima Sen, Dalai, Tenzin Lhakyila, Avantika Vandanapu, Aneet Padda, Akshita Sood, Afrah Sayed and Vidushi.
Ashi Dua on why #BGDC is real and authentic
Dua, who is known as the producer of anthology projects LUst Stories, Ghost stories, Paava Kadhaigal, Ankahi is a kanhan and Passion stories 2revealed how #BGDC It was a joint effort between him, Karan Kapadia, Nithya Mehra and Sudanshu Sariya. In an interview with Zoom, she shared, “We all went to boarding schools. I went to Nainital, Karan went to Lawrence. [School]Sudanshu went to Dun’s school. [and] Nitya went to Welham. So, as boarding kids, we wanted to do a show that tells the story of real, authentic boarding school life in India. Stereotypically, there are a lot of boy shows about hostels. But there aren’t many girls’ shows, so we wanted to do a girls’ boarding school show.”
He also added, “It’s something we’ve all lived through. We’ve all felt some incident or the other happened to one of us. It’s something very close to us because we were in school, there were these characters, there were these people, there were these stories. It These elements of our personal lives are drawn from, but of course the show is fictional.”
“This show is almost a kiss for the young girls of our country,” Dua said. “It’s like telling them to fight for yourself, but do what really makes you happy and find out who you really are before you go out into the world. A year or two is really critical because girls are not sure of themselves, there’s a lot of insecurity. I think , that this is what we’re really dealing with in a fun way.”
New, young cast of #BGDC
The upcoming series was shot in Ooty and was almost two-and-a-half years in the making. Dua explained, “When we started writing it, some policies were changed by OTT platforms and since our show is about girls under 18, we had to rewrite the script twice and that’s why it took so long.”
But the biggest hurdle for the show was casting the seven young characters who make up the main cast. The producer shared that it took him about a year. She said: “We cast over 800-900 girls in India, and that’s when we found our seven girls. They’re brand new, new, except one of them has just appeared in Mean Girls in Hollywood, Avantika. At that time . We got her role, she didn’t. We found seven new faces and that’s what we worked on. Of course, there’s the ensemble of Pooja, Raima and Arjun Mathur and some other good actors. But the show belongs to the seven girls.”
Casting directors Shivam and Anmol found their young actors from Punjab, Los Angeles and even Nepal. The makers did not try to feature celebrities from the industry. For the seven main cast leads, this is their first major, long-form debut.
Ashi Dua on what #BGDC is all about
Like most school stories, #BGDC Depicting issues big and small that can affect teenagers, and unlike other dramas, the Amazon Prime Video series will explore these young girls as they try to navigate these life experiences together.
Dua explained, “When you’re a 17-year-old girl, the things you go through in life… a little bit of patriarchy that you see around you in families, with teachers. This is your first big fight. You have friends that break your heart. It’s friendship, it’s brotherhood, it’s heartbreak. Basically, at the age of 17, you are growing up what it means to be a girl in a hostel in India. We didn’t say anything. The girls still wear, which is what most of the boarding houses do, they wear salwarkams [as uniforms].”
In addition to the appearance of the series, #BGDC It’s also different from the rest of the campus stories because these teenagers are independent from their parents. Dua said: “They don’t go home every day. They live with each other. They stay in a hostel where they don’t meet their families, so their friends are their families. That’s true and the other thing is that there are a lot of shows that have been made recently about school life and all And they felt very … I don’t know if there are schools like that, but we tried our best to make it very authentic. We’re looking to have an alumni screening for our show because those are the people who will relate to it the most.”
Ashi Dua on film production
It was Dua’s first film as a producer Bombay Talkies which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. He shared that he has always been attracted to producers and working on various anthologies in his career has been almost a film school for him.
He said: “I ended up seeing how different kinds of filmmakers have their craft and their shooting style. All in one film, so I think it was a complete privilege. It never gets easy. It’s not even easy now. Yes, I I’ve done a lot of anthologies, but now I have two shows and I’m working on feature films. With every new project you start, it’s like you’re a beginner. You’re a beginner every time. It’s the same process. The end result is really nice, so that’s good.”
Calling producers the backbone of every project, Dua went on to say that they are the ones who make it happen – from the script, the director, the actors and the money. He added that being a producer is not easy, but everything starts and ends with them, from pre-production to marketing and release.
