Competitive Bollywood fusion dance has thrived on American college campuses for decades, but it has rarely been the subject of a scripted feature film. Lena Khan‘s “Best of the Best,” premiering Friday on Netflix, follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali as they join UCLA’s competitive dance team, only to discover that the road to the U.S. Championship is far more raucous and cutthroat than they imagined.
Written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, who each competed in similar circuits growing up, the script drew Khan in even though she was not initially sure she would take on the project. Early on, she recalls mentioning it to a childhood friend, who was dismissive. We’re looking at kung fu, we’re looking at these different arts.
But when we look at our own, we’re used to seeing ourselves as Apu or as the funny nerdy side characters,” Khan says. She wanted the movie to carry a different posture entirely. Minhaj and Venkataramanujam drew on their own backgrounds for the script.
Minhaj’s wife danced competitively, and Venkataramanujam performed with an a cappella team called Chai Town, giving him firsthand knowledge of how consuming the competition circuit can become. Khan spent time with UCLA’s own dance team and traveled to North Carolina to observe competitions in preparation. Khan’s earlier work directing episodes of Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever” fed into how she thinks about representation.
Khan recalls pushing Ramakrishnan toward a specific physical transformation during casting. And then I was like, no, actually, I need you to do a Christian Bale on me. I need a complete athletic transformation,” she says.
Ramakrishnan went on to complete months of intensive dance training ahead of the shoot. Khan built the dance sequences with choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman, with Joya Kazi credited as co-choreographer. Each number was approached with a single guiding question, she says: “What is the essence we are trying to bring out in this particular moment?” Where a typical Bollywood dance sequence gets five days to shoot, the production often had just one.
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