#112: Sheena Patel, Assistant Director & Author

Best Girl Grip

This week my guest is Sheena Patel, an assistant director for Film and TV. Her credits as a 1st AD include Casualty and Dominic Savage’s upcoming series I Am Ruth. She has also 3rd Assistant Directed on feature films such as Boxing Day and Pirates, as well as series like I Hate Suzie and Apple Tree House, and she is represented by Sara Putt Associates.

Sheena is also an author and a co-founding member of the poetry collective 4 Brown Girls Who Write and part of the reason I invited her on for this season is that she has just published her debut novel, I’m A Fan, of which many people are. It’s getting rave reviews and Sheena was listed in The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2022. I’m A Fan is published by Rough Trade Books and uses the voice of a single speaker to explore an unfaithful relationship and the power struggle within that, as well as how this connects with the wider world and our cultural obsession with status. Desiree Akhavan has called it hilarious, heartbreaking and sickening and you can get a copy via the Rough Trade website.

When I was preparing to talk to Sheena I figured that the conversation would be divided into two parts, but of course when someone’s passions co-exist in the way they do with Sheena, some overlap is to be expected and we sort of oscillate between the two and find some surprising comparisons between being an assistant director and being a writer or performer.

We talk about perseverance and how Sheena came to the television industry relatively late, how she establishes a sense of authority, collaboration and harmony on the floor and bluffing your way through imposter syndrome, as well as how and when she wrote her novel, what the process of finishing it and releasing it has been like and why she just wrote wherever her brain went.

It was a really fun and also chill chat. I think Sheena really embodies that sense of harmony and calm that maybe she presents when she’s AD’ing and yeah I came away from it thinking what a lovely way to have spent an hour of my Saturday morning. I think we’re lucky to have someone like Sheena in our film and TV industry and likewise, lucky to have her as a powerful and critical voice in and of our culture, so I feel very privileged to have had her on the podcast.

This is episode 112 of Best Girl Grip.