Speaking at the Cannes Lions conference on Wednesday, Priyanka Chopra Jonas shared her thoughts on becoming a producer, her desire to expand her career in the U.S. and cited the low-budget horror smash hit “Obsession” as a marker of how barriers to entry for talent and filmmakers have fallen.
“I feel like if you have an idea, shoot it, put it on YouTube, and it can become ‘Obsession,’ the movie that just came out,” Chopra Jonas said. “What a wonderful time to be an entertainer, to be in the entertainment business, because ideas are your currency.”
That wasn’t always the case. Chopra Jonas, a Bollywood superstar who has been building a career in Hollywood for the last decade, said she faced some challenges when she got into film because she had no connections. “My parents were doctors, so none of us had any idea how to navigate film,” she said.
“It used to be such a niche industry when I first started. If you wanted to get into filmmaking, you had to figure out what department you wanted to be in,” she said.
She also recalled being told early in her career that Indian cinema would “never be as global as Hollywood because we’re not English-language, and not everybody understands whatever language our movies might be in, whether Hindi, Telugu, Marathi or anything else,” she said.
