Four in a Billion Pictures
Filmmaker Ravi Patel is the director and star of the documentary Meet the Patels in which he chronicles the cultural tradition of matchmaking that united his parents, and that his parents want for him to embrace after breaking up with his white girlfriend. The film follows Patel as he travels to find the right girl to make him, and his parents, happy.
HOTCHKA’s Jeremy Fogelman had a chance to sit down and chat with Patel about the making of the movie.
JF: Hi, thanks for taking the time to talk.
RP: Thanks, what did you think of the movie?
JF: I liked it; I have a different kind of minority background, because I was raised in kind of a traditional Jewish household, so I can sort of relate to the same kind of pressure.
RP: Yeah, I mean half of my friends are Jews and I think it’s because we all have the same mom.
JF: Right, so there is a lot of that, it’s a scandal or controversy if one of your relatives marries outside.
RP: Right. Actually when we were making this movie there was a point in which we started doing it, we started out making something more like a Michael Moore journalistic, but funny, I’d be the funny journalist. Did a ton of research, spoke to a lot of experts, and one of the things I researched a lot was about the “Shiksa.” Are you familiar with that concept?
JF: Yes, I am. So you feel like in the culture that you grew up in that there’s a similar kind scandalous feeling about the outsiders?
RP: I mean first of all, in any kind of first generation assimilating culture, there’s no one way for anything. Certainly in our film, we’re not attempting to make it one message or represent any specific community, rather it’s our story. Specifically it’s my story. And our hope is that people relate to it however it may be. So certainly for me this whole thing is rooted in the fact I grew up expected and expecting that I would marry a Patel girl. And it was something that I never really questioned because I think I just thought it would happen. But I never stopped to think about how it would happen, I think I figured, oh, you know I’ll aim for Patel but I’m still gonna meet her in the romantic way that great American stories of romance have been told. And somehow it’d just work out for everyone. But that’s not really how it happens, because it’s so statistically nearly impossible to fall in love with a Patel, because you’d have to be around them all the time. It’s hard. And when something is hard that’s when you need the help of these other institutions, be they Patel professional groups, wedding season, Patel conventions, and of course the bio data from the Patel parents you saw in the movie!
JF: Well the convention was a thing that was the most outside of my experience. I’m certainly familiar with the general reunion of that type, but I really like one of the things that you said in the movie about how the Patels are like the world’s biggest family.
RP: Yeah, you know I think everyone gets that, no matter where you’re from. Certainly many have that sense of loyalty and community, right? And with Patels, or even Indians in general, there’s a kind of tacit loyalty to each other. Even if I’ve never met another Patel, you take care of them like they’re you’re own. It’s one of the things I really love about my culture, because you know, that’s kind of how we all wish the world worked. But the world’s too big for that.
JF: Certainly I’ve met many Patels over the years, but I don’t really have any notion of how many there are in the US.
RP: There’s a lot, man, and I definitely have the numbers down somewhere. In my memory, it’s the most prominent South Asian last name in the US*. I think Indians are like 1.5 or 2% of the US population. If I had to guess, I’d say at least half a million Patels in the country.
*Note: According the US Census, as of 2000 Patel is the 172nd most common name in the US, the highest of all South Asian surnames. As of 2010, there are 2.9 million Americans that identify as Indian in the US.
JF: Well, you know, the odds are not great but … it’s not the worst.
RP: I would even go to a million, somewhere between those two. Yeah, odds aren’t great.
JF: That’s true, but I think there was a point you made in the movie when you were talking, the worse odds are with actual compatibility between two people where they both like each other.
RP: Well yeah, that’s the added layer of duality I was combining. Wanting the Indian thing but also these qualitative things but only requisite only out of the American model of marriage. For my parents, all those qualitative things come after marriage, the assumption being if you have chemistry and compatibility that all these things will follow in marriage including love. But I wanted both, and I wanted to like her, to enjoy her company, to love her. Definitely things to come, and that’s where it got really tricky.
JF: So for someone who would be watching this movie, I would say you’re really mainly known for being an actor.
RP: I would say I’m unknown for being an actor. (laughs) Only known as an actor if you watch really bad television. And a lot of failed pilots.
JF: Right, but I mean that’s your vocation.
RP: Yes, absolutely.
JF: So you ever feel a temptation to overly dramatize or exaggerate the experiences you were having over the course of this movie?
RP: That’s a fair question. That concern came up a lot when we started it, and I would say this. First of all, anytime there’s more than two people in the room, I do perform. I think we all wear different faces based on the situation, but the question is are you still wearing the same face you would if the camera wasn’t there? And because I’m an actor, I think I’m actually more comfortable with a camera in front of me than anyone else. I’m able to ignore it better than anyone else, and I’m also as a director, the one thing I know is that you don’t write a documentary until after you’re pretty much done shooting it. You don’t know what the story is, all you can do is have a camera on. So the only thing you can do and control is say hey, as long as the people are authentic, truthful, and the same as without a camera. Then, only then, do you have chance of telling a real story and making a great film. So I recognize that, wearing all those hats. And yeah, I think if you met me you’d see I’m the exact same guy you saw in the movie.
JF: Right, one of things that seemed like it might be happening was a sort of reverse movie with your sister that at several points was like, what about you?
RP: What’d you think of that? I mean I loved that, but what did you think?
JF: It’s almost like there was this hidden movie that we weren’t really seeing. And it sort of crept up here and there. Interesting because a lot of times with documentaries they aren’t related to each other, but in this case by virtue of having grown up together, you’re unable to avoid knowing about each other or being biased and it added a kind of interesting authenticity to me. That’s unusual for a lot of documentaries like this.
RP: For the person behind the camera to be experiencing the same thing that they’re recording.
JF: Certainly in a fictional movie, there’s often a mirror of the creator in the material, but this is almost like a mirror between the directors that sort of happens like, we’re experiencing a similar kind of thing. Even if you are the one with the more classic “adventure type,” traveling all over North America.
RP: Yeah, it’s one of the things that I love about this movie. It starts off where it just so happens that the filmmaker is related to the subject. And she’s not a character in the film almost, we don’t show her or talk about her. And then slowly and slowly as she talks with me purely for the sake of getting out my story, we learn more and more from her how she’s gone through the same thing. And over the course of the film, although we don’t see her, we feel her a lot. And Geeta and I really fell in love with that kind of dynamic, those kind of conversations between her and I in India that were kind of the seed of this movie in terms of understanding creatively what it could be. So I loved that part of it.
JF: So do you feel like you’d like to collaborate again?
RP: Yeah, you know it’s funny, if you’d asked me two years ago I’d have said no way in hell, I was pretty sick of her, just done. It’s hard to co-direct anyway, ideally you’re just the number one guy on top. But now, we had some great breakthroughs, we learned to respect each other way more, and I do think we complement each other well artistically. We’ve become best friends in a way I never would’ve thought we could’ve been. So now we’re writing and directing stuff together, we’re actually gonna be announcing a big project in the next few weeks. It’s pretty exciting man. I mean the story behind the film to me is almost as compelling as the one in it, both of which are about family. The film itself is about that and we gained this kind of transparency in the context of looking for love. Even the story of just getting this movie out, we’ve been traveling the country as a family. For example, at the premiere we split up three different cities, LA, Chicago, I was in New York. It’s been a fascinating journey for all of us individually, and a once in a lifetime life changing, evolving process as a family. It’s been amazing.
JF: Do you feel like you learned insights about Americans in general after doing this project? In terms of trying to balance tradition versus modernity.
RP: Yeah, totally, honestly I learned so much, I feel like I got a PhD in all this kind of stuff because I read so many books and spoke to so many people. I could tell you a few that came to mind that really affected me and changed my mind on relationships. One was an editor of Psychology Today who was telling me there are three main pillars in a relationship, and depending on which model of marriage you grew up under, you place an emphasis on different pillars. So here in America, we tend to emphasize mostly on chemistry, which is love, a very romanticized version of love. It’s not something you work to create, it’s something that almost passively happens to you. And I think that there’s so much divorce, because of this little moment that you didn’t even work to keep goes away. And then in my parents’ case with an arranged marriage, it’s almost entirely the other two pillars: compatibility, the things from the bio data, and commitment. And with them, it’s that love will follow later. So holistically it helped me look at all three of these things together and in me it shifted kind of what I looked for, to find what matters. Because I stopped thinking just about what the girl looks like, how she talks, what she wants in life in terms of values, I also just started to think about cohabitation, which is something I hadn’t really considered before. It started to get more and more important just living day to day with someone and having a family and just doing things together. And I don’t think we’re taught to think about those things.
JF: So you think that there are certain kind of lessons that really everybody could stand to learn a little bit more about in terms of what to expect out of relationships or even what to look for?
RP: Look, for me it was life altering, whether everyone else takes the advice is up to them.
JF: I mean, you can only know what you can know about yourself.
RP: Exactly, I agree.
JF: It’s not like everyone’s relationships are perfect. It was one of things that I’ve heard arguments about matchmaking and arranged marriages, a lot of the same things your parents were talking about in the movie. Expectations and what they think is going to happen and the 50% of non-arranged marriages ending in divorces. And whatever the reason is, I don’t know, I’m not a sociologist, I don’t know why it seems to be happening like that. Maybe it’s just that divorce is easier now than in years past and it would’ve been the same rate if it wasn’t as much as a stigma 100 years ago. I don’t know, but I think most people can relate to the struggle that you were going through. I know that it was something I felt that yeah, I get that, sometimes you feel like there are mixed messages from your own family about what they actually care about.
RP: Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that. It’s kind of like been the big surprise over the past year, we’ve been doing all these festivals, we sold out every screening since we took this movie out. And won a ton of audience awards, and these are audiences that are vastly non-Indian. And I think it’s because of what you just said, I think people are finding all these different ways to relate to it, because everyone knows what it’s like to have a family, to love your family and to make each other happy. To want to change each other, to deal with conflict, yet still love each other in the end. These are universal things. I did not see that coming, I knew Indians were gonna love this thing, and probably a few other groups too because our cultures are so similar. But it’s crazy. I was in this screening in Chicago recently and it was a room of about 250 people, and they gave a standing ovation, it was so touching. And the crowd could not be more diverse, young and old, different skin colors, all enjoying the movie in their own way, they’re all touched in their way. That’s been a really pleasant surprise.
JF: Do you feel like that there was ever a worry that you might be pushing stereotypes or clichés about people?
RP: No, because that’s not our responsibility. I think there’s gonna be people in the NPR crowd that derive some academic meaning about what we’re doing. But the fact of the matter is that we told our story, my story. We’re not claiming it to be anyone else’s story. The only thing that can come from this is positive, which is hopefully someone watches and be entertained, affected, or both. And that’s it, we don’t claim any more responsibility beyond that.
JF: Right, I was talking to someone about the movie, and they asked if it was clichéd to me, but I thought it was just about real people so I don’t know how stereotypical you could accuse it of being.
RP: Well, it’s certainly clichéd if you hadn’t seen it yet, I think. If I hadn’t watched the movie and just saw what it is about without even the trailer, I’d think oh, just another cultural diaspora story. And I’d expect it to be contrived and respective in many ways. Geeta and I tried to creatively avoid a lot of the trappings we saw in those kind of things, but we also just felt like, you only end up feeling someone is contrived or repetitive if it’s not good. We also just felt that, screw that, it’s our story. It’s not like you don’t have the same love story told a million times in every movie in every season. The difference is how it’s done, and so for us, let’s try to make a romantic comedy out of a documentary. There’s these When Harry Met Sally interviews in there, let’s put animation in there, let’s put in upbeat music nostalgic of the romantic comedy genre. Let’s put jokes, let’s put them on the screen! You know, let’s make it fun, and hopefully if it’s fun and good enough, people will think it’s different.
JF: So I guess for me some of the more comedic elements were how you switched between the real footage and animation parts. So did you feel like you wanted to have a lot more animation, because it seemed very carefully placed in the movie? Like you start seeing animation at the beginning of the movie, so you think it’s something that’s gonna keep coming up. But really it only happens a couple of times.
RP: Yeah, so it happened because we knew we’d miss certain moments out of respect for the people involved in some of them. Like so that was more of an ethical thing, where we knew our relationships with people in the movie would outlast the movie itself. We didn’t just want to shove a camera in their face. I also had a list of funny stories, jokes, and concepts, and there was also these personal moments instead of just seeing my face, it would be funnier illustrated. We tried different elements before trying animation, and those animated stories we actually told back and forth to each other. So those weren’t just told one time, we actually crafted them by telling them to each other over and over until we were comfortable with the size and the cadence. Because with animation you can’t really edit, it’s a real big process, once you’re locked in on custom animation, that’s what you get. So I hope that answers your question.
JF: Okay, well I’m glad we had a chance to talk and get more insight about some of the stuff you were going through.
RP: Yeah, likewise, thanks for taking the time for speaking to me and helping get the word out.
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