Popcorn confidential.

Chutney Popcorn director-star Nisha Ganatra gets honest about filmmaking, love scenes, and showing the movie to Mom

Six years ago aspiring actor Nisha Ganatra was slugging it out in Los Angeles, choosing from the five-line parts she was offered--always as a Latina, always in gangster flicks. "I remember thinking, The best way to change the roles I'm playing is to create my own material," says the 27-year-old Indian-American.

So she moved to New York, enrolled in NYU's film school, and while studying there wrote and shot Junky Punky Girlz, a 16-millimeter short that became a festival favorite. Ganatra, who had never directed before, "fell totally in love with being behind the camera." She then met fellow student Susan Carnival, and the two cowrote what is now Ganatra's debut feature, Chutney Popcorn. The 90-minute film follows Reena, an Indian-American photographer who's busy juggling a very traditional family, an emotionally shut-down girlfriend, and a newly married sister who finds that she is infertile.

The movie, which has already won many filmfest awards, debuts June 9 on TV's Sundance Channel. (It will also be shown at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.) Its innovative plot bypasses the done-to-death coming-out tale in favor of focusing on Reena's quest to save her straight sister's crumbling marriage by having a baby for her. The heartfelt dialogue tackles numerous complexities, including two-mommy families, society's demonizing of women who choose not to be mothers, and the mirthful clashing of old-world Hindus and urban dykes.

When Ganatra was ready to begin production on the feature, which was funded in part by Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions, she found the perfect person to play Reena's girlfriend when she locked eyes with Jill Hennessy (TV's Law and Order) at an industry party in Manhattan. "After ten minutes of talking to her, I thought, Wow, she is exactly like this character: Her role on the show [as Claire Kincaid] was so rigid mid serious, and in real life she's really very funny and sweet."

But when the lead actress slated to play Reena backed out al. the eleventh hour. Hennessy suggested that Ginatra play opposite her in the Reena role. "I told her. `Nish, we've got chemistry, babe. Don't fight it.'" remembers Hennessy.

The fledgling director "was really nervous about it. I didn't want to be the sleazy director who suddenly decides. `Now I'm gonna be your girlfriend!'" Ganatra. who has worked with Spike Lee on his films. elaborates: "I have been giving him shit for so long. Like [on the set of 1989's Do the Right Thing], `How exactly are you going to explain to Rosie Perez that she'll be doing a scene where you'll be rubbing an ice cube on her nipple for no apparent reason?'"

When the time came to shoot her own sex sequence between herself and the sultry Hennessy, Ganatra recalls with mock mystification, everyone in her mainly female crew "managed to show up for work and was crammed in the bedroom watching." Hennessy has her own memories of the experience: "During the sex scene I was running my toes up and down something hard. It turned out that it was the boom operator's thigh! I felt really bad about it afterward, like I'd sexually harassed her."

Ganatra brings a quiet, sensual intensity to her role in Chutney Popcorn, perfectly complementing Hennessy's skittish character. "I wanted the couple to seem realistic and not be this fantasy glamour-dyke couple," explains the now-Brooklyn-based Ganatra, who is single in real life.

Although Ganatra wasn't exactly out to her family when she made the movie, she says they were ultimately supportive. "I hadn't actually told my dad--but he knows now!" Ganatra says. Of her mom, who inspired the character of Reena's wisecracking mother, Meenu (Mahdur Jaffrey), Ganatra reveals, "Before the first screening we had a little argument, and I said, 'OK, mom, you need to calm down and be supportive because it's my world premiere and you're freaking out.'" True to her usual form, Ganatra's mother shot back, "Well, how do you think I feel? The whole world is going to see my daughter being a lesbian!"

Ganatra's mom ultimately loved the film, and the director is often gratified when people say that; Chutney Popcorn is the first gay-themed film they would take their mothers to. The filmmaker (who is currently finishing up two new scripts: one a sci-fi action flick and another that she describes as "Mean Streets with gifts") also loves "when gay men walk out of the theater and whisper to each other, `Wow, lesbians are funny.'"

Tucker writes for Time Out New York, Interview. Paper, and Acoustic Guitar.

Find more on Nisha Ganatra and Chutney Popcorn at www.advocate.com