Nisha Ganatra attends the UK premiere of Freakier Friday on July 31, 2025, in London. A board member of Women in Film, Ganatra says she worries that the recent gains women directors have made may disappear.Kate Green/Getty Images
Growing up in Vancouver, Nisha Ganatra, now an acclaimed director, nearly wore holes in her Freaky Friday DVD, so often did she and her friends watch it in the early ’00s.
“We all thought we were Lindsay Lohan,” said Ganatra, who has an open face and a voice full of laughter, in a video interview from her home in Los Angeles. As a teenager, she played guitar like Lohan does in the film. She even joined a band. “Eventually I realized I was never going to be her, so I found other skill sets,” she says.
Skills like directing episodes of the coolest series on TV – Transparent, Girls, Better Things, Mr. Robot, Dear White People, Deli Boys – and films including Late Night, The High Note and her newest, the just-released Freakier Friday, which reunites Lohan and her screen mom, Jamie Lee Curtis, in their beloved body-switching roles.
Anna (Lohan) is now a music executive and single mother to teenager Harper (Julia Butters), with Anna’s mom Tess (Curtis) acting as an overly invested co-parent. After Harper and her nemesis Lily (Sophia Hammons) clash at school, Anna falls for Lily’s widower dad Eric (Manny Jacinto) – appalling both teenagers, who scheme to break them up. Enter an inept medium (Vanessa Bayer), and suddenly Harper is Anna and Tess is Lily and hijinks are ensuing.
On our call, Ganatra, who is 51 and a single mother of two herself, was freshly home from her London premiere. But her six-year-old daughter was not so fresh. As if transported into her film, Ganatra had to keep switching from Director to Mom.
“When I saw the script for this sequel, I kind of screamed,” she says. “I had to tell myself, ‘Be cool, be cool – ’ Oh, honey, what do you need?”
She briefly disappears, then reappears. “Jamie Lee invited me to her house,” Director continues seamlessly. “Because she had director approval, which of course she deserves. It was so amazing. If I could have told little Nisha that one day she’d be doing this, she wouldn’t believe it. That’s a cool feeling – oh, sorry.”
She disappears again, returns again. “My son was trying to save the situation, but it got worse.” She laughs. “A while back my daughter was crying in the car and a friend whose kids are older said, ‘I miss that.’ I said, ‘You miss this?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I miss the empty threats.’” I’m a mother, too; we both snort.
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“Anyway, I was nervous,” Ganatra admits, back in Director mode. “Because I think Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the most amazing, wise women walking the planet right now. She lives her life in such a place of fearlessness. She leads with this big heart of love and art.”
Typically for many women, Curtis talked about what she did least well in the first film. “She said she wasn’t good at physical comedy, which is an absolute lie,” Ganatra says. “She’ll nail anything you throw at her. When I pitched her my idea for the record store scene – that she would hide behind album covers and end up crawling down the aisle – I could see the producers thinking, ‘You’re asking an Oscar winner to crawl on the floor?’ But Jamie didn’t hesitate.
“And she knows she’s good at the emotion. She knows she can go deep. That was important to this film. It couldn’t just be a fluffy sequel. I knew the minute we saw Curtis and Lohan on screen together we would have a big emotional reaction. But that had to go somewhere, transform into something. Because if it’s just, “Oh, it’s Jamie and Lindsay!’, that dies out after 20 minutes, then what’s your movie?”
As for Lohan, who’s struggled with substance abuse in the past, “She went through a gauntlet, and she’s come out really happy, balanced, open, healthy,” Ganatra says. “We were all dying for this for her. She glows on screen and in life.” Lohan’s two-year-old son was frequently on set, which “brought out a beautiful side of her that the camera sees, too.”
Filming a scene between Lohan and Curtis on the beach, “there was such history between these iconic actors letting their walls down and connecting. Then they jumped in the ocean, laughing and screaming the way only girlfriends do.”
Ganatra’s filmography is varied. As an undergrad at UCLA, she made short films even though she wasn’t studying film. At NYU’s film school, she was already directing episodes of MTV’s The Real World. She played a version of herself, a lesbian of Indian descent, in her first feature, Chutney Popcorn (1999). But she seems especially drawn to intergenerational stories, with a tender spot for the mothers.
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“Those moments where we lose it on our mom, then we recover and feel terrible – those were so important to this movie,” she says. “Your mom is the safest place for you to blast your emotions. Moms live a life where they’re holding everybody’s demons and joys, and it’s a thankless, unseen thing. So I really wanted to show it. Your hairbrush is in the bathroom, sweetie.”
Whoops, that’s Mom again. “It isn’t? Did you check the drawer? Okay, you can use mine.
“And I love the idea of, ‘Can Anna dare to have another love in her life?’” (Director is back.) “Is that too selfish? But the message is, more love is just more love.”
A board member of Women in Film, or WIF, Ganatra is a champion of hiring women in her crews. One of the WIF programs Ganatra supports is called Reframe, which awards a stamp to films with gender equity behind the lens. Most of the department heads on Freakier Friday are women.
“Women behind the lens don’t get as many jobs, so our reels can’t compete,” she says. “You have to dig deeper into women’s resumes; you find out she had no resources, yet made this incredible work.”
Ganatra worries that the recent gains women directors have made will disappear once boxes no longer need to be ticked: “There’s always the fear of a movement being a black square on Insta and it’s done. The slide to status quo is so powerful. The challenge is to make sure diverse voices keep being heard. You can be a great director, but if you don’t get to show your work, no one will ever know.”
The thrill of doing a studio film and seeing it open in thousands of theatres – “that’s something female directors don’t get to do much, either,” Ganatra says. “My editor and I have Cinderella Syndrome. We’re so afraid the clock will strike midnight and we’ll have to go back to our Citibank temp jobs and our crappy suits, not have this dreamy life we have.” She makes a point to seek out women mentors and take on mentees.
She’s drawn to projects like Freakier Friday that ask, “Which is more important, your biological family or the family you choose?” Ganatra thinks the one we choose is more special: “Because you have to keep making efforts to keep that family together, keep it prioritized. There is a real threat in Freakier Friday that this new family won’t make it. But when everyone chooses to see each other, they see they can love each other.”
That’s why Freaky Friday has everlasting appeal, Ganatra says: “The wish fulfillment that your mother can see the world from your point of view. And now I’d love my children to see that I don’t know everything. That we’re all doing the best we can. That message of empathy and choosing to forgive each other is what these films get right. And what we need so much right now.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
