Roshan Sethi, who co-created Fox's medical drama The Resident, finished his own residency last June, and since his job as an attending physician didn't start until November, he took advantage of the gap in his schedule and set out to write a script in the middle of the pandemic with his partner, Karan Soni, who plays Dopinder in the Deadpool movies. The resulting movie, 7 Days, is a romantic comedy that pairs Soni with Australian actress Geraldine Viswanathan (Bad Education) and makes its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend.
Soni and Viswanathan play a couple of Indian-Americans whose old-fashioned parents are trying to set each of them up in an arranged marriage -- an idea that he's very much open to, and to which she is decidedly not. When the pandemic breaks out, they find themselves trapped together by the circumstances of quarantine. The film explores ideas of loneliness and connection, which millions of people experienced and yearned for during the pandemic, so although the idea of arranged marriage is specific to certain cultures, the themes explored in 7 Days are fairly universal.
The first draft poured out Sethi and Soni, who completed the script in less than a week. With the help of the Duplass brothers, they were on set shooting the movie just two months later. After a hectic eight days of filming that saw them shooting up to 17 pages a day, their dream had finally become a reality.
"Roshan and I are in a relationship and we were talking about how in the middle of this time last year, we were creatively feeling sort of depressed. So Roshan had the idea -- 'what if we just wrote our own thing and put in some of our own money and just made something, so we didn't feel creatively adrift?' So we very quickly came up with this idea and wrote this in five days, in a fever dream, because we had nothing else to do," explained Soni.
"We sent it out to a few line producers that we knew, just to get an idea of like, what this would cost, and then just as a hail mary we sent it to the Duplass brothers. We were like, 'they'll never read it,' but I had worked with them a bunch so I was like, 'well, let me just send it out.' And yeah, within a week or so, they read it and said, 'we want to make this. How soon can you make it?' And then before we knew it, we were rushing into making a movie, which was amazing. It pretty much sustained us during this whole period, creatively, because we were working on the post-production and all that stuff, so it's been a huge gift to get to work on this."
Viswanathan and Soni previously worked together on TBS's comedy series Miracle Workers, so everyone knew each other heading into the project.
"We just fell right into it. It was just so easy," said Viswanathan. "We'd done two seasons of the show together by that point and there was a total shorthand. I think we really understand each other as performers and what our strengths are, and we're friends, so it's easy to improvise together and all that. So that was the easy part."
The actress described the script as "beautiful" and said it gave her "warm, fuzzy feelings." She also relished the chance to play a character who's hiding a secret of sorts.
"I think that duality is always really fun and interesting to play with rather than just being super upfront and honest, which is more who I am, so it was cool to play someone who's holding their cards a little closer to their chest."
Sethi and Soni drew from their own experiences surrounding arranged marriages, and Sethi's own parents met just seven days before they were married. While that may sound way too fast to the average American reader, the fact is that arranged marriages are quite traditional in other cultures, and last just as long as "love marriages," as they're called.
"In general, I would say that I think arranged marriages are just as successful as love marriages, statistically speaking, since love marriages are so generally unsuccessful in America. So I think it's a very interesting and valid way to meet your soulmate," said Sethi, who expounded on that idea.
"What's interesting about it is this idea [that] with love, which can be so fickle sometimes. it can sort of go away if you are in love with someone when life comes at you, sometimes in practical ways. And what's interesting about arranged marriages is you work out all the practical stuff before, like, do your families get along? Are you in the same sort of career and that sort of stuff, or the same culture? And then it's just about connecting with a person versus connecting with a person and figuring life out around that connection."
7 Days features interviews with long-wed couples whose marriages were arranged, which harkens back to the classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally.
"Originally, it was actually scripted interviews with actors who were playing couples, and they were going to be interspersed throughout the movie in a way we would figure out in editing, and then we decided to just interview our relatives because you can't make any of them up," said Sethi, who took advantage of emerging technology. "We just interviewed them over Zoom as we were preparing to make the actual movie," he said.
"It was very emotional for us to interview them," said Soni. We did 20-minute interviews. There was [Roshan's] family and my family, but we wanted to find some younger people, not just people who met in India or around there, so my Mom connected me to some doctors who met in their 30s in America and were completely American-born and found this to be the best way to connect with someone. Each time, by the end, I remember [Roshan] asked the question, 'what does your partner mean to you,' and people would get very emotional, and we would get emotional. I was like, surprised by how the connection was so much deeper than we thought."
"Yeah, it was really interesting because [there was] such a contrast. I don't think there's anyone out there who's dating who's like, happy. It just seems to stop. And then these people describing these very simple, emotional stories. 'We met each other, we married [because] it seemed good enough, and we've made a life together.' And it was very striking because that is a completely valid way to build a family," said Sethi.
That said, he acknowledged that these days, American-born Indians are making the decision to marry "over a more prolonged period of time. I don't think anyone will ever do it again the way that our parents did."
"Yeah, I don't think anyone's like, decide by Saturday if you're going to get married," joked Soni. "But I think it also depends [from] family to family. I think some families are more traditional and expect you to be with someone Indian, and others don't. Oftentimes, if you want to be with someone Indian, America is such a big place and these websites and ways to connect are often quite easy to meet people across the United States, so it sort of serves as a halfway point between that."
Making your first film is never easy and it's even harder to do in the middle of a pandemic, but that was hardly the only challenge the filmmakers faced.
"To Geraldine's credit, this was not an easy shoot," Soni lamented. "We shot a lot of pages each day. The environmental conditions were very hot. There was a heatwave and it was like, 110 degrees every day, so it was not easy or glamorous in any way, and she was just so prepared and she just killed it. It just made all of it so easy, because for me and Roshan, we were doing a lot of these jobs for the first time, because we'd never had a movie made, so it was so nice to know that when we needed her to shine she would shine and be great."
"It was very punishing, honestly, for both of them, to know that many pages and memorize that many lines. I mean, I was wearing gym clothes for the entire shoot, but they had to wear these costumes, and Geraldine had to do her own makeup. The whole thing was very difficult," added Sethi, who nonetheless felt compelled to take the opportunity to direct his first film in the midst of the pandemic.
"I had finished residency, and I had always juggled screenwriting and residency, for so long, for five years to be exact, and I had never had my own uninterrupted time to be creative. I wasn't starting my attending job, which I've now begun, until November, so I had these months to make something and do something," said Sethi, who only works for 12 weeks of the year. "I have a great deal where I can be creative in the time I'm not at the hospital." It sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
As for what's next for the two leads of 7 Days, Viswanathan voices the lead in Paramount's upcoming animated movie Rumble, which is set in the world of wrestling and hits theaters next February, while Soni is just waiting for a call from Kevin Feige regarding Deadpool 3.
"I haven't heard anything," Soni said with a sigh. "I originally signed for four movies so I still have a two-movie contract that's in an email somewhere that exists, but that's all I really know. I haven't really heard anything. Before Fox sold to Disney, there were a lot of plans and they were more communicative then, but since the Disney thing happened, it's all a mystery as to what is happening. But I hope we get to make more! It'd be so fun to see that character in that expanded world but also to see Kevin Feige's take on what to do with it since he's such a big X-Men fan and he's getting to play with those characters in that world now, so I hope we get to see something with him."
While Sethi will soon begin caring for patients again, he's still incredibly busy in Hollywood, having worked on an upcoming Sally Ride series and served as a co-writer on the abortion drama Call Jane, which appeared on the Black List in 2017.
"That really owes a lot of credit to Hayley Schore, who's mother's friend was part of the Jane movement in the late '60s," said Sethi. "I wasn't involved in the production at all, but it was a mammoth effort getting that movie made. We're so grateful to Elizabeth and Sigourney for finally signing up to do it," said Sethi, who is tossing around ideas for his next project with Soni, though the two don't have any concrete plans at this time.
"It all depends on how much money someone will give us to make our dream come true," said Soni.
"We'll eventually do a Before Sunrise/Before Sunset version of 7 Days where these two are getting divorced in the next movie. It's called 14 Days," Sethi said with a smile.
"Can we go into weeks, or months," joked Soni, making sure to get the last laugh, and cementing them as one of the cutest couples I've ever interviewed.
Watch the full interview above, and stay tuned for further release details, as 7 Days is a charmer featuring two very likable leads.