Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Puneet has been in love with the stage since he was a second-grader in Kolkata. After working as a theater actor in his youth, he ventured into a tech career. Now, he’s found a way to return to the performing arts through film. A frequent collaborator with filmmaker Amir Jaffer, Puneet is the lead actor and writer on their latest project, a feature film titled Not Tonight.
The feature film takes place over one evening in a plush Bay Area home, where a heated conversation between husband and wife unravels as the night wears on. The film puts the microscope on the couple, Amar and Amy, after they return from a party. Amy hopes to go to bed for an early-morning flight to Seattle, but Amar has other plans – he wants to talk about the past and pick at old wounds. The conversation takes unexpected turns when Amar invites an unexpected guest to his house to join them.
Ahead of the film’s screening at the Bravemaker Film Festival in Redwood City on July 11, Puneet spoke to India Currents reporter Tanay Gokhale about his career path and the inspiration behind the film.
Edited excerpts below:
Q. You wear many hats as a producer, writer and actor. How did that happen?
Puneet: I’ve been in love with stage since the second grade; there’s this picture of me being on stage, singing a song dressed as a sailor boy, offering flowers to a damsel and I remember not wanting to get off that stage.
That’s when the love affair started. I grew up in Calcutta, which people say is the intellectual capital of India, but I think all the performance arts are also in the air, so to say. I absorbed that, so I did a lot of stage work in theater all through college and beyond. Then I came to this country, almost two decades ago, to jump into tech, which is a completely different field.
I’m not an engineer; I’ve always been on the business side of things, and naturally, I fell into this role of becoming a tech evangelist. I was crafting narratives about technologies that my company was selling, addressing different forums all over the world. I think that came naturally to me because of my innate desire to tell a story.
Around ten years ago, I got more serious about theater again. I worked with desi theater groups, but I’ve also worked with a French playwright in San Francisco, and just last year I worked with Playwright Foundation of San Francisco. I enjoy broadening my horizons in theater, and at the same time, stumbled into films because things started falling in place, and since then, I’ve been acting regularly in independent films.
Q. You play one of the lead roles in Not Tonight and also wrote the script. How did that come about?
Puneet: I started to write scripts because, as I auditioned for acting roles, I realized that I was getting calls for the same kind of parts. For instance, the stereotypical father of a teenager who disapproves of how they’re behaving because the character has come from India. Some of them have even asked me to put on a heavy Indian accent for the role — the Apu effect, as I call it! So the roles became limited, and in general, representation of South Asian men is not that great in Western cinema. So actors in my demographic tend to lose out, and I didn’t want that, so I started writing.
Anyway, one day Amir and I were sitting at our favorite Chinese restaurant, Red Hot Chilli Pepper in Fremont. We were talking about making a feature film. But everything costs money, so we wanted a story that was concise and easy to produce. Amir brought up the iconic film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – and that discussion led us to the idea for Not Tonight.
I’d say the contours of Not Tonight and Who’s Afraid… are similar: a couple comes back home after a party, they start conversing, and the night unravels. So I started writing the film, and since I knew that I was going to play the lead character, I wrote the film as a Hollywood indie film with a little Indian tadka.
Q. The Indian tadka manifests in a very nuanced portrayal of an interracial relationship, South Asian patriarchy, and the struggles of familial life as an immigrant. How did you strike that balance between representation and critique?
Puneet: One thing I hate — and I’ve acted in a few — is a film that preaches. If I make a movie, I want to deliver a message wrapped in a realistic situation without it being preachy. Let’s not think that the person in the audience is stupid and won’t get it, and let’s not shove it in their mouth with a spoon.
Amir and I have made a lot of provocative stuff; we don’t hold back. So I was writing about stuff that I had really seen and heard around me as a South Asian immigrant who has lived in the U.S for so many years. Yes, we have a strong sense of patriarchy in India, and then there is latent racism that I’ve seen in interracial couples here, and that ugliness can creep into the relationship. We didn’t set out to provide any neat answers either; we just served up these issues and left it for the audience to make of it what they will.
Q. Zooming in on the relationship between the two leads, Amar and Amy, how did you go about crafting their dynamic with each other?
Puneet: I don’t judge my characters, and I don’t profess to know everything about them, but as an actor, I try to get into the character’s mindset. And for Amar, the whole evening is constructed as ‘I’m going to provoke these people into coming out and saying stuff, and that’s how I’m going to get my revenge. He’s kind of a jerk, really!’
So, for Amar, he just wants to provoke her and see what comes out of it. We’re talking about a marriage that’s about 15 years old, so he and Amy really know each other. There’s really no secrets, at this point. He doesn’t necessarily believe she’s a racist, but he brings it up to see what reaction it elicits. And in response, she calls him a mama’s boy, and then the conversation takes another turn.
We just wanted to show a real, honest conversation between two individuals when they are mad at each other. Because when you’re mad, you say things you don’t necessarily mean, but you just want to hurt the other person, right? Both of them are doing that; they’re both guilty of it. And this kind of stuff happens all the time in real relationships.
Q. Finally, what has been the film’s journey so far, and where is it going next?
Puneet: We finished the post-production phase of the film in the summer of 2024, and then we started to submit to film festivals right away. Last fall, we premiered at the DC South Asian Film Festival. Then, we also got invited to the Chicago South Asian Film Festival, where our film screened along with acclaimed films like Boman Irani’s The Mehta Boys. Even though it’s not a conventional South Asian story, and only one of the four characters is desi, we were thrilled that both these film festivals screened our films, and we received a great reaction from the audience.
Now, we have the Bravemaker Film Festival in San Francisco, which is a homecoming of sorts for our film, and we’re really happy that we can watch and celebrate with the entire cast and crew.
After the festival runs, we want to release the film on a streaming platform, so that audiences the world over can enjoy our film!
Not Tonight will screen at 8:45 pm on July 11 at the Century Cinemark Theater in Redwood City as part of the Bravemaker Film Festival. Get your tickets here.