Rekha Shankar, best known as the host of Dropout’s “Smartypants,” multiple seasons of “Dimension 20,” and a number of other Dropout series, is making a movie. Shankar launched a Kickstarter to fund her movie, “Vidhya’s Guide To The Afterlife,” last month. With only days left until it ends, the Kickstarter has raised over $170K.

“Vidhya’s Guide to the Afterlife” is an exploration of grief, identity, and self-discovery wrapped in a hilarious comedic concept. In the movie, professional chef Vidhya Ramachandran returns to her hometown, Philadelphia, in the wake of her grandmother’s death. However, in an unexpected twist, her entire family, and nearly every other Hindu, disappears due to the Hindu Rapture. Vidhya partners with the only other remaining Hindu priest to find her family.

Rekha wrote and will star in the movie. Her co-star in the actual play series “DesiQuest,” Sandeep Parikh, will serve as director. The cast is stacked with a number of Shankar’s comedy friends, with a few from Dropout. In an exclusive interview with Temple of Geek, Shankar shared how it feels to have so many people believe in her project. She also shared how her own life inspired elements of the movie. Shankar also discussed why the “third culture kid” story is important to tell.

Rekha Shankar Explains Why the Support for Her Kickstarter Means so Much

Temple of Geek: Your Kickstarter has earned over $170,000. What does that mean to you as a creator, knowing so many people believe in your vision?

Rekha Shankar: That is crazy to me! I am coming from a place where the last Kickstarter I did, I was fighting tooth and nail to get $14,000 in 30 days. That was 10 years ago. So, its really just mind blowing and so inspiring to see so many people come out and support for this one.

Temple of Geek: How does it feel to have so many of your friends essentially donate their resources to your Kickstarter? Because you now have rewards including watching Izzy Rolland GM for the first time or Persephone Valentine running a game.

Rekha Shankar: I started to do a gratitude journal this year. I sometimes would get this feeling like, everyone else has a manual on how to do things, and I just really stumble around and figure it out. I don’t know what I’m doing and everyone thinks I’m dumb. All this stuff. So, I started the journal to be shut up [those thoughts]. To really take stock of the truth and the anxiety of it all.

To see so tangibly on a rewards page, the amount of your friends that are like, I’ll give you my time. It makes me want to cry. It’s so meaningful. I go like, what did I do to deserve this? This is so nice. And then I have to remind myself, well, I would do this if they asked me to do it. If Sephie has a Kickstarter and is like, would you DM something stupid? Okay. As long as they know it’s stupid.

So, it really means a lot. You can pay for people to day play on your set and as a crew member, but you can never pay for investment. And interest and friendship and community like that. I’m so grateful that somehow that is here and present for this project. As a secret resource I wasn’t even looking for and didn’t even know would be such a part of the campaign.

Rekha Reveals How the Script Has Evolved Over Time

Temple of Geek: How long have you been working on this script and what was the inspiration behind the movie itself?

Rekha Shankar: I’ve been working on the script since about 2021. The inspiration was my friend saying, do you have a feature script? And I said, no. So that’s the really boring inspiration. But I heard about this grant with Mark Duplass and it was like, Okay, I need to start getting serious about having multiple types of materials.

Someone who is the story consult on this, when I was banding around ideas of I need a low budget idea, thought of this idea of a rapture. I was like, okay, that’s perfect because there’s no such thing in Hinduism. Something I’m grappling with in my personal life is that I don’t understand Hinduism very much. I think it’s kind of a funny plan.

Somebody who doesn’t understand Hinduism enough to have a Hindu rapture happen to them. Then things just really unfolded from there where it made me think, Well, what makes me feel this way about my religion? I lost my grandfather several years ago. I had this huge just conflict with the religion where the way my family or our Hindu priest wanted to grieve was not the way I wanted to.

That felt bad and that felt wrong. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do if staying silent and not crying during a ceremony was helpful to the priest, but not helpful to me. So, this movie was really instrumental in me figuring out that grief and figuring out that it is okay for me to make my own traditions.

Temple of Geek: Why do you think so many people as creators have this desire to combine grief and comedy? The way that you did.

Rekha Shankar: I think grief is too sad. You can’t explain away that sadness. Grief is this distance between what you wish were true and what is actually true. That is not something you can ever solve for a viewer or yourself. But all you can do when grieving is trying to make sense of something. A lot of the way I try to make sense of things is via comedy. So, I’m sure it is not just the case in my family, but in other people’s families too.

But when I lost my grandfather, there were a multitude of things that I was like, if I had my right mind about me, I would’ve found very funny what people were doing. Now I can look back and have that perspective on how 15 aunties are telling you to do the same thing at the same time, and you’re like, I don’t need all of you to be doing that. At the time you’re just like [ok]. But now I’m like, that’s crazy. Get off my back. Or the priest having his phone on in the middle of a ceremony multiple days in a row.

At the time, I just found it disrespectful. Now I’m like, you’re a criminal. I hate you. You have us in the palm of your hands. You’re the only Hindu priest in this area, so you could just be as bad as you want. F*ck off. So, stuff like that, I think you can get comedic juice out of once you have perspective on it. Once you cobble together what your meaning of the whole incident is. So that’s why I think people tie those things together.

Temple of Geek: I can’t imagine I get mortified if I forget to put my phone and computer on do not disturb during an interview. To have that go off during a ceremony is mortifying.

Rekha Shankar: If he had shown any semblance of like, oh my God, I’m sorry, that’s one thing. But he did it multiple days in a row, didn’t seem to care. I’m like, listen, I don’t know. I just hate you, sir.

Temple of Geek: How has the story and the script evolved over time as you yourself has evolved as a writer and comedian?

Rekha Shankar: When I started writing the script, I wrote it in a feature writing class taught by Tim Neenan, excellent teacher if you ever need one. Also, Ben Axelrad, excellent. I think I started it thinking comedy, comedy, comedy. I want everything to be funny. I want every character to be funny. I will tell you a fun little secret is I also named my character Tracy when I started because I had based her a little bit on Tracy Flick.

I don’t think she resembles that at all anymore. I wanted to give her an Indian name, but I knew if I gave her an Indian name, I would write her too much like myself. So, I was like, I’ll give her an American name and I’ll change it later. So, I named her Tracy. At first, everyone was funny. Everyone was kind of a sketch comedy character, but just in a feature script. Then I did a table read a lot of the stuff from my quote, funniest character, which was the priest, did not land. I didn’t know why.

It was really when my director, Sandeep Parikh and his producing partner, Anand Shah stepped in. Given what I’ve told you now, it seems silly that I didn’t see this. But they were like, ‘Hey, a lot of Hindu priests in this country can sometimes be swindlers. What if your priest wasn’t just kind of a stoner slacker, comedic relief, but he was actually conning her.’ And I was like, oh, yeah.

So, it gave him way more dimension. He wasn’t just a side character. He was in it just as much as she was, but for a bad reason. That was the biggest duh moment where I needed someone to point that out to me. I’m like, I am constantly complaining about my family’s priest. And I didn’t even make him a bad guy. I just kind of made him a bad priest that was just kind of like, eh, I don’t remember. I don’t know. Trying to make him funny and doing that totally changed the script.

Rekha Shankar Talks Teaming Up With Trusted Friends & Creators

Temple of Geek: Speaking of your director, why are you excited to collaborate with Sandeep on this movie after working with him on “DesiQuest?“

Rekha Shankar: I’m excited because I’ve seen Sandeep’s patience and calmness on set, which I really appreciate. I’m a big Michael Schaubach fan, and that is something I’ve always appreciated from him. I now know what to look for in directors. When I saw that in Sandeep, I was like, okay, great. And then when Sandeep was so passionate about pitching himself to me it was a no-brainer to choose him.

I can pay people wages, but I can’t buy passion. So that was sort of a no-brainer. What really made me excited was the notes he gave me on the script because it was just peeling back stuff that I didn’t know was there. Finding through lines, finding moments that I didn’t know were in the script. Making it more of a feature rather than a very long sketch. I really appreciated and definitely needed [that].

[It was also] validating because Sandeep and his producing partner, Anand, and are both South Asian. They had so much of their own experience to add to the project. I’ve never worked with another South Asian writer before on anything to my recollection. So, to have such a specific thing as the Hindu 13 day ceremony, they had both done those before. It was like, whoa, I can get that level of expertise. Sandeep’s dad works at his local temple. I’m like, cool. Wow. It’s so specific. I love that. So yeah, that made me really excited.

Temple of Geek: What are you looking forward to about working with this cast on this sort of production? Because you’ve worked with so many of these people before. I know that you and Jordan Myrick and Lily Du for a long time.

Rekha Shankar: I am really excited to be working with everyone because it is a totally different playground than I’ve been with them on before. I’ve worked with Jordan Myrick, for instance, as an improviser. They were in my web series that I Kickstarted 10 years ago as well. And just on the day-to-day, they’re one of my best friends. And Lily, we worked together at College Humor forever, and on Dropout stuff.

Sam [Reich] obviously was my boss. Dhruv Uday Singh I’ve improvised with him so much. But this is a feature. We have to keep a story straight. I’m so excited for that. I think it’ll be such a different challenge much like it in the writing process. I’m going to have to keep my sketch mentalities in check and be like, we absolutely should goof off. But there are scenes that are written as goof off scenes.

There are scenes where this is mostly a note for me. I’m like, I’m going to need to keep myself in check for the greater good as much as I might not want to on the day. I’m very excited for that challenge. I always want to be growing. I want to be an eternal student, so I want to always challenge myself to try that next bigger thing.

“Third Culture Kid” Stories and True Representation

Temple of Geek: Both you and Sandeep talked about the “third culture kid” concept, at the improv show. Why are you excited and why is it important to tell that story?

Rekha Shankar: I am really bored of the third culture kid, the American kid born to Indian immigrant parents story. That we see strict parents, they want you to be a doctor, you want to be a musician, you want to be a ballerina, whatever. Oh, the parents yell at you. They don’t want you to date. You have to get an arranged marriage. I’m so bored by it, it makes me mad. Here’s the secret. I’ll always buy and give money to those movies because I need to see anything.

It’s just frustrating because we can evolve out of that. But Hollywood doesn’t let us. I don’t blame those filmmakers as directors, as actors at all. It’s just like that’s the story Hollywood wants to buy out of you. They want to buy the sad immigrant whatever story. I’m like, yes, but also there’s other stuff going on. I’m literally telling you a sad immigrant story in this movie, but I think it’s in a really different stupid way. I think it’s really hyper specific.

When I saw “The Farewell,” I was like, that’s how you do it. That’s a story that applies to everybody, but is so specific to this one Chinese family and to Lulu Wang’s experience. But it still felt totally universal. I’m like, that’s exactly what I want to do. I’m going to give you something specific. My problem with other movies is they’re too general. You don’t get into it.

I can’t remember the main character’s name most of the time. I want to give something that is hyper specific in its specificity. It applies to you. So, if my main character is a pastry chef, you’re like, oh, I’m not a pastry chef, but I’m a blank. And that still applies to me.

Temple of Geek: No, I’m totally right there with you. I am so tired of the dramatic coming out story. It’s always, my parents hate me. I’ve got this sad story. It’s horrible. I’m like, my coming out stories are funny! When I told my mom, she straight up said, “Yeah, babe, I’ve known since you were three. Was this your news?”

Rekha Shankar: There’s such a place for the sad one too. I don’t want to take away from people who’ve had that really sad thing. I’m like, we just need a lot of them.  If you’re a queer kid that’s like, I just need a laugh right now, you should be able to find a movie where there’s a queer kid that’s out and it’s not like the plague has been set upon their house.

Same with if you’re an Asian kid whose parents are immigrants. You should be able to watch something where they don’t talk about school or they don’t talk about getting an A or they don’t talk about an arranged marriage. Just to have options would be incredible.

Temple of Geek: It’s like that moment of when people say representation matters, and I’m like, I don’t know that you really actually understand.

Rekha Shankar: No, it feels like a fake sentiment from a lot of people. They’re just like, oh, if I have someone on screen, anyone, I’m like, well, sure. But when I see Priyanka Chopra on whatever a TV show, I’m not like, oh my God, representation. She’s mega, mega famous in India. She’s a model. She’s North Indian. She’s all these things that don’t relate to me at all just because she’s brown with black hair. We get into those generalities of brown with black hair, that’s it, done. It’s like, no, we need a little more specific than that.

“I’m Ecstatic That [The Movie] Won’t Be [Filmed] In My Apartment”

Temple of Geek: What are you excited for with the actual filming process, especially now that it won’t all be in your apartment?

Rekha Shankar: First of all, I’m ecstatic that it won’t be in my apartment. That makes me feel so good because I simply can’t imagine how I would’ve done it, but we would’ve. I’m really excited for the teamwork aspect of it. One of my favorite projects I’ve ever done was “Gods of Food.” Which I did for Dropout, which was like a chef’s table parody. Not a lot of the scripted stuff was popular on Dropout, but it’s still my favorite thing I ever made.

Michael Schaubach directed it. Richard Card DP’d it, Pam Robison was the producer. It was so cool to come in every day for a month and work on the same thing. I just got to be the writer on set pitching jokes and doing my thing. All the other wheels were moving on their own. In sketch, you really do have to think about a lot of parts. Especially low budget sketch, you’re like, oh, we probably need to do it again. I wasn’t looking at this way.

Everyone’s thinking they have five different jobs basically on a sketch shoot. I’m excited for in a movie for the possibility, even the slight chance that I’ll have these everyday experiences with a team making this beautiful story that maybe I can just perform. That seems so cool. I come from a post-production background. I’ve hustled and tried so hard to do everything all myself. It seems like we might be shaping up to a place where I can just perform on the day. That would be awesome.

Temple of Geek: You’re starring in this, but are you expecting to still be wearing the writer hat throughout? Or are you kind of hoping that you can be fully in the actor mode and then hear cut and that’s when you can jump back into writer mode for a minute?

Rekha Shankar: I would simply love to be performing and then hear cut and jump into writer mode. My brain is too ill for that to be possible, but it’s a dream. I would love to do that. Because I struggle with sometimes being in the moment as a performer. Because I’m thinking like that and it’s like, no, no, no, just don’t read it the way you’ve practiced it a million times.

Read it in response to how Lily talked to you, be in the moment. Which is my improv training that should just in theory shake beautiful hands with my writing training. But it’s sometimes they operate independently and one overtakes the other, and usually it’s the writing part. So that’s my hope. My hope is that I can do that.

Temple of Geek:  I hope so too. The last stretch goal, $180K, is “we make the movie we want to make.” What does that look like to you?

Rekha Shankar: Currently as the script stands, we have one main location, which is just a house. Then we have other locations like an Indian grocery store where she goes in the beginning of the movie. And then there’s a Hindu rapture, she goes back, and it’s a totally empty store. We wanted to show that contrast. We have another location that’s like a river where she discards of some ashes of a family member.

Those I think will make really poignant scenes in the movie. The more resources we get, the more likelihood we can actually film in those other locations because company moves eat up so much of your time, your money, and your resources. Can you even fit your whole crew in there? All these questions come into play. So the more resources we get, the more likelihood we have in actually finding those other locations and being able to use them.

As opposed to on a classic multicam. They’re always coming back from the interesting place. They’re like, well, that was fun. And you’re like, where did you just go? You have all this cool stuff, but you couldn’t film there.

The “Vidhya’s Guide to the Afterlife” Kickstarter ends on Thursday, March 20 at 6 pm PDT. You can donate now to help support Shankar’s vision for this movie.