‘Best of the Best’ Pulls Off the Perfect Heist Through Its Dance Numbers

There are a dozen fantastically smart moments in “Best of the Best” that help situate the viewer inside the high-emotion and surprisingly high-octane world of collegiate Bollywood dance competitions, whether you had a Shah Rukh Khan shrine in your closet or not.

But maybe the best one happens when fearlessly innovative freshman Maya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) pushes back against the idea that UCLA’s team should go with a Bollywood wedding-themed routine for this year’s Best of the Best Bollywood dance competition. There’s more to Indian culture than Bollywood clichés, after all. It’s expected and extra. Team Captain Ronak (Ankur Rathee) shoots back that extra is the point. To be “extra” is to be alive, and to be really feeling the emotions you feel.

And Bollywood, even at its most cliched and nostalgic, is a celebration of that.

So is “Best of the Best” — and through a lively fusion of different dance styles, traditions, sensibilities, and even some fantastic (if prone to malfunction on poor Maya) drone work. But it was a monumental challenge for the filmmakers, as the sharp script by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam had to leave room for the Netflix film’s dance sequences to pay off what the dialogue promises without tying the hands of the movie’s eventual director, dancers, and choreographers. They had to hope the filmmaking team could actually cash the check.

Director Lena Khan and her team did just that, partly with some “mighty graphs” on Google Sheets and some “very extensive” PowerPoints. The sequences needed to look cool, be executable in only one or two takes as part of the film’s blistering shooting schedule, and thrill both newcomers and devotees to the world of Bollywood fusion dancing. But Khan also wanted a viewer to be able to track the emotional journey of Maya and her best friend Anjali (Priyanka Kedia) through the dances alone. The whole dramatic arc of the movie had to fit on a stage.

“So we had this line graph of the journeys of every major relationship or team in the film. It’s UCLA’s journey. It’s Maya and Anjali’s journey. Anjali and Ronak. The bottom of the graph was each dance, and there was a line graph of how they’re moving in those relationships and how we’re representing it. And, of course, Maya and Anjali’s journey takes the most atypical route because they’re going from codependency to attachment issues to attention to having a healthier, more loving and supportive relationship,” Khan told IndieWire.

‘Best of the Best’ Emily V. Aragones/Netflix

Khan and the choreography team of Phillip Chbeeb, Makenzie Dustman, and Joya Kazi mapped that macro journey onto each dance, with the goal of finding movement ideas that would express the things the characters can’t say out loud. Changes in style or movement (or, sometimes, an overeager fog machine hidden inside a prop tiger) progress the plot and create important changes in the characters’ relationships.

“ I was excited at the opportunity that you can tell this story through dance. I told [our music supervisor] Kier Lehman that I wanted to be able to listen to this movie.  You should be able to tell the story and the relationships and the feelings through the movement, and the music,” Khan said.

The music had to come first, with Lehman and Khan working closely to craft dance remixes that would feel vital and current while lovingly referencing all corners of South Asian culture and the South Asian American experience as well. For the choreographers, the mandate was clear: Khan didn’t want the sequences to look like “Glee.” They couldn’t feel as disconnected from the emotional reality of the characters in the way that a music video works, while still being heightened and fun.

This required deep collaboration between the choreography team and the camera team. “We couldn’t just throw scale at every dance and expect it to be compelling,” cinematographer Adam Carboni told IndieWire. “Instead, we brainstormed ways to create unexpected moments using optical illusions, hard-rigged camera mounts, mirror reflections, and simple in-camera tricks. Phillip and Makenzie literally choreographed a moment where two dancers fill the frame with handheld sunflowers, and when they lower the flowers, a new character has replaced the former. It’s clever moments like that that kept the spirit of a humble collegiate dance team alive, even though we had this grand-scale production behind it all.”

‘Best of the Best’ Emily V. Aragones/Netflix

Carboni put his music video and commercial background to use to be as relentlessly innovative visually as Maya is in creating dance routines. Instead of a traditional training montage, Carboni used motion-control to create the illusion of a single take so that the team’s prep would feel like a dance in itself, for instance, and used some clever plate work to make a livestream by Lilly Singh’s intrepid dance circuit reporter/gossipmonger look like we’re seeing it from inside of her phone.

That spirit of innovation also animated the choreographers, who wanted to make the dance sequences look as exciting to the audience as they feel to the characters to perform them — in no small part because they were as integral to helping Carboni shape the visual language of the dance sequences as he was in finding ways to get the camera involved in them.

“As choreographers, you are normally not integrated into pre-production and designing these scenes. It’s very rare,” Dustman told IndieWire. “ So when Prashanth and Lena and Hassan are inviting us to be like, ‘Hey, this is the script. The dance scenes have a lot of space. How would you design this, and how would you integrate what’s happening into each of the characters, and how do you want to storytell within the scenes themselves?’  To be woven into that process as choreographers is so rare, and they were so generous with all of us, because that’s just not something you get. And also, dance movies are so rare in general.”

Given how rare, the dance team left it all out of the field in the film’s finale, where Team UCLA Agni dances their final number in the Best of the Best competition — a British museum heist to take back the Koh-i-noor diamond, created by Maya and with her and Anjali as the leads, but with a moment for each of them and each member of the team to express themselves.

Behind the scenes of ‘Best of the Best’ Emily V. Aragones/Netflix

“There are so many departments involved in that, and our North Star was making sure that our dancers were safe the entire time, because they are pushing these huge sets, these walls, around,” Kazi told IndieWire. “We were constantly making the frames bigger so that dancers can jump through them, making sure that they’re heavy enough so they don’t tip over. But we also wanted these [museum] walls to be historically and culturally, not only accurate but also meaningful. So I had the great privilege of sitting with Lena and sifting through artwork and pottery that would be dynamic visually for the frame and against the color palette,  then also getting to find statues that would be inspiration for our meaningful little moments in the choreography.”

The lighting is just as complicated. “As the team nears the prized diamond, they trip the alarm, setting off an ‘Ocean’s Twelve’-inspired sequence of dodging lasers. Phillip and Makenzie choreographed the sequence using yarn so the dancers knew where each laser would be. On the shoot day, we carefully replaced the yarn with 50-watt static lasers, which gave us enough exposure to make the beams visible in the wide shots,” Carboni said. “Somewhere I have a photo of the whiteboard in my prep office — I’m obsessed with dry-erase boards — where I wrote down 40-plus lines of action that needed to be captured during the finale, many of which included lighting effects that played directly into the story.”

“The finale integrated everything that I think Maya and Anjali stood for, and represented everything but the kitchen sink being thrown into [the number],” Chbeeb told IndieWire. “We are way more complicated than can be funneled into streamlined, bite-sized pieces of content we’re used to seeing online and I felt like the piece really captured the messiness of humanity. And it also required us to essentially have like six different sets for one piece, which is just unbelievably difficult.”

The dance team had to be quick about teaching both cast and crew — notably Steadicam operator Rod Calarco, who would need to match the pace that Chbeeb sketched out with an OSMO Pocket in PreViz, now with a heavy rig strapped to him — and they only got a couple shots at some of the most important visual and emotional moments in the film.

“[The choreographers] are in real time on headsets cueing the spotlights to open and close because the crew didn’t have rehearsal time. We have shots we literally have to get right now and get the timing perfect. And as we moved through every section of the finale, it all felt like that,” Chbeeb said. “There were so many of  those sort of like mini miracles across the entire thing when we saw it happen, we’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it worked.’”

‘Best of the Best’ Emily V. Aragones/Netflix

“ Our dancers also were phenomenal in pushing for everything every single day. The things that we had them doing, they might as well have run a 10K,” Kazi said. “It was so physical. Definitely scratches and bruises, and then on top of everything, they also have these choreographers with these crazy ideas who are also telling them that, ‘Guys, if we don’t get this by end of day, this entire thing is going to get scrapped.’”

In that way, at least, there’s a virtuous cycle of art imitating life imitating art in the making of “Best of the Best.” The cast and crew felt as euphoric as the characters executing the dance sequences, particularly the finale moment when Maya and Anjali take what should be a lighting SNAFU and use it to cement their friendship, forever.

“What’s really hard with female counterparts and actual dance partnerships is you don’t know who’s leading,” Dustman said. “There has to be the sensitivity to who is going to initiate this next move, and you have to turn up your senses, and that’s the, to me, the beauty of, like, femininity, is this awareness and this high sensitivity of a person next to you. We’re trying to emulate that in that moment and that duet and also balance it out with the group coming together and shining in ways you have not seen them shine. All together, it somehow makes this beautiful amalgamation of meaning and purpose and power.”

“The day that we filmed that [final dance between Maya and Anjali], there was not a dry eye in the room,” Kazi said. “I saw grown men crying, and it just makes you feel like the work that you put out as an artist — it’s so precious, and when people receive it and feel it, that’s the whole point of being in this line of work.”

“Best of the Best” is now streaming on Netflix.