Best of the Best is a new dance comedy about two childhood best friends, Maya and Anjali (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia), who join UCLA's competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team while Maya tries to overcome a dance-gone-wrong accident that got her labeled as "drone girl" on social media. The unfortunate moniker stems from getting hit in the head with a drone while trying to dance around them in high school. It's a hilarious problem only today's hyper-digital youth might face.
Best of the Best is full of laugh-out-loud humor, charm, and incredibly imaginative dance routines that will blow your mind. We sat down with director Lena Khan and co-writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam to get their tips on writing a dance movie that not only entertains but tells a heartfelt story.
From Comedy Friends to Writing Partners
Minhaj and Venkataramanujam's creative partnership began long before Best of the Best. The two first crossed paths as young comedians working the college comedy circuit.
"We met doing college comedy shows," says Minhaj. They had known of each other through the internet, but officially met around 2009 when Asif Ali (Venkataramanujam's manager), booked the three of them for a show at Syracuse University.
Minhaj was from Davis, California, while Venkataramanujam grew up in Downers Grove, Illinois. Despite coming from different parts of the country, they recognized something familiar in each other: Two young South Asian guys trying to build careers in comedy.
"We both are these two brown kids that want to go make it in showbiz," Minhaj says. "Let's go make our mark on the world. Let's kind of do it together."
They stayed in touch as Minhaj pursued his Hollywood ambitions, with their friendship becoming an important support system for both of them. When Venkataramanujam eventually moved to Los Angeles, their friendship evolved into something else.
"To Hasan's credit, when I first got to LA, he reached out to me and was basically like, 'Do you want to be writing partners?'" says Venkataramanujam. They started sharing stories, batting around ideas and meeting on weekends to work on scripts. What began casually eventually became a long-term writing partnership.
"We just got very lucky in that the stuff we did together, people seemed to like it," Venkataramanujam says. "And we just kind of followed that instinct."
Finding Their Director
Lena Khan was introduced to Best of the Best when they sent her the screenplay and asked for her feedback. For Khan, one of the script's biggest attractions was its intelligence and its desire to make the relationships feel authentic. She was also intrigued by its ambition. This wasn't just a dance movie. It was a comedy, a friendship story, a coming-of-age movie and a large-scale spectacle all at once.
Khan agreed to come on board as director if she and the screenwriters could solve one problem: Make the dances themselves tell the story.
A Dance Within a Story Within a Story
Venkataramanujam says one challenge of writing any dance movie is that filmmakers are working within a genre that already has an established history. "There's a whole canon of films that have laid a lot of groundwork," he says. "Specifically with dance, it's such a passionate community, you want to make sure that you're finding new ground."
Bollywood-fusion dance presented an additional challenge because the competitive routines themselves often tell culturally relevant narratives. "The dance routines are not just dance routines, they're stories," says Venkataramanujam.
Dance teams create themes and tell miniature stories through choreography. That meant the writers couldn't simply come up with an impressive dance number. They had to devise a story for the routine that could compete with what real dancers are already doing. Then they had to connect that miniature theme to the movie's larger theme.
"You don't want these things to feel disconnected," he says. "You want them to feel additive."
One sequence, for example, uses a traditional South Asian wedding as its theme. That gives the filmmakers an opportunity to celebrate a recognizable aspect of South Asian culture while also commenting on the degree to which weddings can sometimes dominate outside perceptions of that culture.
But the sequence has another dramatic job: Anjali is selected as the lead, subtly increasing the tension between the two friends. But it still needs to be an entertaining dance number.
"So, when we're writing, we're thinking about all these sort of layers. They're like sedimentary layers," Venkataramanujam says.
The Three Things Every Scene Should Do
That layering connects to one of Venkataramanujam's larger philosophies about screenwriting, one Minhaj says has made him a better writer.
"Prashanth, you've told me this: In every good, well-written scene, three things should be happening," Minhaj says.
On the surface, characters may be discussing one thing (plot), while something else remains unspoken underneath the conversation (subtext). At the same time, another element of the plot can be advancing. There might also be a visual motif, like an object, image, or piece of information that gives the audience something else to follow.
The specifics can change, but the principle is that a scene shouldn't accomplish just one thing. For Best of the Best, that philosophy became especially useful because the dances had so much screen time to fill.
Each routine needed its own story and theme while simultaneously doing work for the larger movie. Some routines had completely different visual styles. A USC-team routine has a fierce, almost military-like quality. A Bollywood wedding number embraces the extravagant visual language of traditional Bollywood. The finale involves the theft of the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
The result is that each dance becomes its own little movie but one that still has to move the larger movie forward.
Writing a Dance Scene
For screenwriters staring at a blank page and wondering whether they're supposed to start describing pirouettes, hip-hop combinations or Bollywood choreography, Venkataramanujam has reassuring advice: Don't. At least, not unless a specific movement is essential to the plot.
"You're going to have choreographers coming in," he says. "What you should be putting on the page, specifically for dance sequences, is the emotion and the feeling that you're trying to convey with the dance."
That means describing relationships, imagery, tone, and emotions rather than trying to choreograph every movement yourself. For the USC-team sequence, the important idea was the ferocity of the dancers.
"It's not that they're just really good," Venkataramanujam says. "They're like an army. They're like Marines."
That kind of description gives the choreographer something more useful than a list of dance moves. "You want to give the choreographers images, you want to give them themes and ideas," he says.
His advice ultimately comes down to a surprisingly simple rule. "I think it's better to focus on what the emotion that the dance is trying to convey, as opposed to trying to get into the mechanics of the dance."
Because the writers had given each routine meaning and stakes for the characters, she could get to the bottom of what each dance means to the story. "Prashanth had put so much meaning into everything," Khan says. "There's always so much that you could draw off of."
That may be the most important takeaway in Best of the Best. The characters may be dancing, but the story shouldn't stop moving.
Best of the Best is currently streaming on Netflix.