Nimisha Mukerji (‘Under the Bridge’ director): ‘This story is close to my heart and has always stayed with me’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
Nimisha Mukerji was well familiar with the story of “Under the Bridge,” the eight-episode Hulu true-crime thriller starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, when the opportunity arose for the filmmaker to direct one of the installments. She jumped at the chance in part because, having grown up in Canada and being of South Asian descent, she related to the victim at the center of the story on an almost primal level. “Under the Bridge” at its core tells the true story of the murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk (played with power and heart by Vritika Gupta) on the night of November 14, 1997 in Victoria, British Columbia. She left to meet friends at a party and never returned, her body found floating in the Gorge Inlet waterway. Seven teen girls and a boy were accused of the savage killing. “I’m the same age that Reena was,” Mukerji says. “We were born the same year, and like her, I experienced bullying in high school.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
In the limited series, Gladstone plays the role of Cam Bentland, a local cop trying to crack the case and a composite character. Keough portrays Rebecca Godfrey, who wrote the 2005 book on which “Under the Bridge” is based. But neither actress appears in the episode directed by Mukerji, the fourth in the series entitled “Beautiful British Columbia” (which premiered May 1) that serves as a series of flashbacks prior to the killing of Virk. The episode not only looks at how Virk fell in with the wrong crowd and the unlikely way her parents – portrayed by Archie Punjabi and Ezra Faroque Khan – got together years before as well as the racism they faced. “I told (writer) Quinn (Shephard) and (showunner) Samir (Mehta) that this was the episode that I felt I could contribute the most, because I understood that experience and knew I could bring something personal to the material,” Mukerji recalls. “This story is close to my heart and has always stayed with me, and it felt like a chance to do something really special.”
Mukerji had long been a fan not only of Godfrey’s seminal book but also one written by Reena Virk’s father Manjit Virk. The story both told was one that the filmmaker describes as “‘Lord of the Flies’ with girls, and they (looked) to get Piggy to kill herself. That’s the way young girls operate. It’s vicious.” It was unfortunately something Mukerji could easily connect to. “As a teenage girl growing up in the Nineties, the world was so different than it is today. Everywhere you would look, the idea of what beauty looked like (put forward) the same sort of imagery: blonde, blue-eyed white young girls. My way into the story was growing up in a very white suburban community in Vancouver…What you see in the episode builds up to actual real violence. But there’s all of this groundwork leading up to it.”
That groundwork includes a massively uncomfortable dinner scene with Reena’s hoodlum friends that Mukerji says hews closely to the way things really went down. She remembers bringing friends to her own home as a teen and worked in her direction to evoke that same excruciating vibe. “What does it feel like to come into that immigrant house?” Mukerji asks rhetorically. “As a young person, all you want to do is eat sandwiches on white bread and be just like everybody else, especially in the Nineties. You just want to belong. What I loved about Reena was, she not only wanted to belong, she wanted to stand out. I connected to that so much. For me, it was really tasking the script and trying to infuse that distinctive point of view through the camera. How do you pull out those silent beats and highlight the points of view you’re trying to get across?”
The experience of directing the episode had a profound effect on Mukerji. She maintains that the process “really had me grappling with how far I’ve come from being a teenage girl to who I am today. I’m a mother now. I have a young son who’s biracial. I was able to bring all the parts of myself to this. So it felt extremely personal, and I felt a great responsibility to get this right for Reena and for her family.”
New episodes of “Under the Bridge” premiere over Hulu on Wednesdays through the finale on May 29.
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