When I met the director Meera Menon in our undergrad years at Columbia University, she was wearing an Annie Hall vest and an enigmatic smile, and I immediately wanted to know her.  We became friends while performing in a series of student-written one-act plays, and she starred in my first full-length play the next year. A long-term collaboration was born that has since spawned several short films, one late-night collage commemorating Katie Holmes’ marriage to Tom Cruise, a whole lot of Facebook activity, and newly, a feature film. I’ve been privileged to witness Meera’s transition from teen actor to full-grown woman director, and the feature comedy we co-wrote, she directed, and I produced, Farah Goes Bang, recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Drawing inspiration from our own friendship as well as other sources, FGB follows three twentysomething women who hit the road to campaign for John Kerry in 2004, one of whom, the titular Farah, is trying to lose her long-lingering virginity.  For her exceptional work on FGB, Meera was honored with the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize, and in addition to being both family and inspiration to me, she is now one of the most promising young directors to watch in independent film. In our first mutual interview, Meera and I discussed the road to, through, and beyond Farah Goes Bang.

– Laura Goode

I. The Early Years: Influences and Introductions

Laura: You are Meera. I am Laura.

Meera: I am Meera and you are Laura.

Laura: We know each other pretty well. We’re doing this interview in a sort of knowing-each-other format. So I was trying to think of questions that have answers that I don’t already know about you. I don’t really know when you decided to be a filmmaker. Is there a moment, is there a phase, is there an event that you would connect with realizing you wanted to be a filmmaker?

Meera: Well, I think I always did, because I would write scripts and shoot stuff with my dad’s camera with my next-door neighbor Manny, growing up, since I was like, six or seven years old. That was, like, what I did when I got home from school every day. So I think on a very clear level, it was what I always wanted to do, but I definitely have a straight-A student, immigrant parent background that made me very wary of identifying it as the thing I wanted to do for my career for a much longer time, probably well into college, until I took classes with professors that were working filmmakers that demonstrated to me that that was a career choice...