Mira Nair Interview

I think films are about people who want cinema to take you on journeys - Mira Nair

She's every filmmaker's dream. Her first feature film Salaam Bombay! (1988), the story of a group of children surviving on the streets of Bombay, was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival as well as 25 other international awards. Since then Mira Nair, pictured above, hasn't looked back. The director of Mississippi Masala (1991), The Perez Family (1995), Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), My Own Country (1998), Monsoon Wedding (2000), Hysterical Blindness (2002), Vanity Fair (2004) and The Namesake (2006) has also directed a number of documentaries such as  So Far From India and The Laughing Club of India.

In an exclusive interview with Pervaiz Alam, Mira Nair reveals her secrets of filmmaking that have won her international audiences and numerous awards.

There's some thing nice about Mira Nair. She is a true Punjabi- a trait associated with warm, relaxed and lively people. There are no hang ups. You get what you see. I'm also impressed with the choice of her hotel in one of London's most happening areas, Soho, where the sex shops of the 80s are disappearing fast to be acquired by fashionable cafes and bars. She's staying in a suite at Soho Hotel where 'the Soho suite' costs £1950. Above all, Mira Nair is very articulate  as I discover during the course of the interview.

The subject of my interview with Mira Nair is the 'Crossover' cinema as this is a buzz word among the new breed of filmmakers in India.

No body has defined 'cross over cinema' so far, but, in broader terms, it means the kind of cinema that can be distributed successfully in the UK, US and Canada markets, leading it to capture the imagination of the international audiences. The names of three Punjabi women - Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadda - top the list of the successful 'crossover filmmakers'. Interestingly, these filmmakers do not like the tag of 'cross over cinema' as they see themselves as the directors of international films that have cross over appeal.

However, Mira Nair is magnanimous enough to share her secrets with other filmmakers on what ticks at international level. I ask her;  is it the 'white factor' as described by some filmmakers, meaning that films having white protagonists do well in the west. Richard Attenborough did it with Gandhi and Cry Freedom. Recently, Gurinder Chadda did it so unashamedly in her Bride and Prejudice.

"I completely disagree with that, and the success of 'The Namesake' has proved this. It's a stunning commercial success. It made more money per screen than any American film out there at its opening. It has not been seen as a desi (Indian) film, although in the soul it's completely desi. But, there are no goras (white actors) in this film really to speak of. We are defeating that whole notion every day with every show of The Namesake," says Mira Nair.

She believes audiences must be able to relate to cinema irrespective of its country of origin. "I think people come to the cinema to be transported to see themselves and to recognise themselves in characters and to feel things. It defeats the whole idea that you need a white character to take you through to the dark continent. I really don't subscribe to that notion, not at all," adds the director of The Namesake.

According to Mira Nair, most stories, if well told, have greater appeal. She is quick to plug her new film. "I see The Namesake as a universal tale of millions of us who've left one home for another. It's also a very personal film for me, because it was inspired by grief after losing a parent in another country that was not our home, and that is what the centre of this dramatic story of The Namesake is. But, uncannily, the roads that the Ganguly family travelled in The Namesake are almost exactly the roads I have travelled."

Mira Nair argues that an immigrant in a foreign land is an immigrant irrespective of his or her background. I immediately calculate and realise there are hundreds of millions of immigrants in this world. That's a good formula to make films about immigrants. In her opinion, The Namesake is a perfect example of a good crossover film that transcends boundaries.

"I left Calcutta after twelve years to come to study in America and live in New York and, since then, have been living in the city actively for the last 30 years between worlds. The Namesake is a portrait as much of what it's like to live in between worlds- to live between India and America- to look out of your window in New York city, and instead of seeing the Hudson River to see the Ganges," says Ms Nair.

She is forthcoming in her opinion on her kind of cinema as she admits, "I think emotion in cinema is really getting rarefied because there's so much emphasis on special effects and trickeries that the human conditions are somewhat forgotten."

I have started summarising the tips of making a successful 'crossover' film. So far, the tally is short. Just two; themes relating to international people such as immigration, followed by a heavy element of emotion quotient. I would discover later how naive I was.

One has to see Mira Nair's films to understand how adept she is in exploiting human emotions. She hit news headlines when she won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival for her emotionally charged but funny film Monsoon Wedding, a story of a Punjabi wedding starring India's Laurence Olivier, Naseeruddin Shah, and an ensemble of Indian actors. The film, shot on locations in thirty days, received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Foreign Language Film, besides doing good business at the box office.

"Those who have seen the Monsoon Wedding would know that it's a love song about my city Delhi and my punjabiat. For Indians, it's a desi film, but the fact is that the whole world enjoyed watching it. Because, they understood the honesty of it as it was made with a lot of love and affection." Mira Nair warms up.

I take it as a cue. I go for the final kill. Is it just the emotional factor that she keeps in mind before finalising a project? I ask her smilingly, with the intent to make her declare  the weapons of mass destruction in her armoury as a director. She smiles back easily, but her answer is much more enigmatic.

"The beauty of the cinematic medium is that I can use any thing that I'm inspired by. I'm inspired, for instance, deeply by contemporary photography ...the photographs of Raghu Rai (India's best known photo-journalist), Raghubir Singh (Iconic photographer from India whose work regularly featured in magazines such as National Geographic) and Alvarez Bravo (Mexican Manuel Álvarez Bravo is known for surrealism in photography). These are the frames that taught me to bring to The Namesake a kind of austere photographic style, very different from the hand-held swirls of the Monsoon Wedding," says Ms. Nair with an intent to give it- bit by bit.

Now, I realise making a successful 'crossover' film is not as simple as it appears to be. So many elements go into it.

"I think cinema can be very potent and powerful in describing what it's like to live, literally, between countries," she comes back to her pet subject, The Namesake. "I filmed the two cities of Calcutta and New York as if they were one city, because I believe there's a great synergy between them...so that the audience could feel what Ashima and Ashok Ganguly in the film feel. Literally, you don't know sometime where you are, because you could be in Calcutta you could be in New York city; that's the way the film has been made, but, at its heart, I really think that this is a film for families. This is a film about mothers and sons and fathers and sons. It's a film about parents and children. And, each one of us has been either a child or a parent. I think films are about people who want cinema to take you on journeys."

The great thing about Mira Nair's work is that she has been able to portray a balance between art and populism through her cinema. She guarantees good box office results as well as great reviews.

Her film, Hysterical Blindness, gave HBO its highest original film ratings in three years. Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film starred Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis, Gena Rowlands, and Ben Gazarra. Over 15 million viewers watched Blindness on HBO and critics recognised the film with a Golden Globe for Uma Thurman and three Emmy Awards (including Best Supporting Actress for Rowlands and Best Supporting Actor for Gazarra). Some of the secret of this wider acceptance lies in the making of The Namesake.

"For instance, a key thing when you make a saga of  over 30 years is how do you provide transitions that will propel the story without the clichés of subtitles and voice-overs which I hate. So, in this film, for instance, the fact is that it's about immigrant people, who leave one place for another, but I don't want it to be simply in a reductive way about immigrants. It's a deeper..metaphorical condition.

"It's a film about movement and crossings of suitcases, of bridges, of rivers, of trams in one country and of subways in another. It's about all these movements that either connect us or separate us. For me, that was a large part of the glue of this film, because, also, I see a great synergy between these two cities of Calcutta and New York. I use this whole idea of bridges and rivers and so on as the glue that would nip the 30 years together," says Ms. Nair.

I have lost counting tips for making successful 'cross over cinema'. I'm also getting a bit impatient. It's time to come to the point. What's the crucial ingredient in your filmmaking, I ask her. Is it the screenplay, I implore.  She looks at me with an artificial disdain, but then gives away warmly.

"Of course, I have a screenplay in front of me when I make a film. But, when it comes to shooting I try to do scenes with bare minimum dialogues. As we all know, cinema is a universal medium with a universal language. I believe cinematic language does not need verbal language, sometimes. In fact, I feel we do not need to be verbal all the time. The way you walk, look into the eyes, make gestures, express through acting- these are the things that convey volumes of emotions. You'll notice that I have very few dialogues in my films. Actually, they (my films) are more visual than verbal. They are more emotional than lectures. People from various geographical backgrounds and cultures can relate to my films. Because, they can feel the emotions. They can follow the story without making an effort. I think that's the key."

I repeat after her like a parrot, 'more visual than verbal...so that's the key'. She smiles, "Yes, that's the key."

For the first time, I'm feeling relaxed. I sense this is the opportunity to humiliate the Bollywood directors who are so fond of verbosity. I put it to her that it must be a pain to see a Bollywood movie.

"Yes, our Indian films are full of verbosity. There are lots of dialogues, lots of songs and dances," as she says I imagine Bollywood directors turning into their graves, but hang on. Here comes a shocker, "In fact, the whole vocabulary of Indian films is different and just because of that reason I love those Indian films."

You love Indian films! Don't you think there's a need to get rid of this verbosity if Bollywood has to go for the 'crossover cinema'?

"I don't think that there should be any need to make only cross over films. I really think the vocabulary in our Bollywood films is fantastic. It's beautiful and unique. That's the strength of Bollywood, and it should never change," she says it with genuine expression.
Hurrah Bollywood! Stick to your ways of filmmaking and forget about crossing into Mira Nair's boundaries. Perhaps, she doesn't like competition from her compatriots. Perhaps, that's also not true. Because, she is making a film Gangsta MD with Hollywood's Chris Tucker, based on Bollywood blockbuster Munnabhai MBBS.

I decide to go back to my favourite theme- crossover. Surely, a good story that can captivate international audiences must be her priority before embarking on a project?

"Frankly, I do not think about the audiences first when I choose a film project. My priority lies somewhere else. I listen to my heart. I question myself; would I be able to live without making this film? Or, should I have to make it. It has to be that fire in the stomach that I have to make this film. That's the first thing I think about. However, when I put all the elements together such as adaptation, screenplay, casting actors, then I think about the audiences. Once the basic work is done, then I'm very aware that what is an in-joke and what is some thing that is understood by every one, but which is never to say that you should water that down to make it more acceptable."

She is turning out to be a genuine Punjabi. She does think from her heart. She cried when she read Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Namesake. She cried again when she read the screenplay. I must confess I have seen the film twice and I really liked The Namesake. At its screening during the London film festival in Leicester square at Odeon, almost every second pair of eyes was wet, I noticed. I tell her about my favourite moments from the film. She listens with rapt attention as if I'm telling her High School results. She's impressed by my choice.

"The scene in which Gogol is going through a haircut is also my favourite, but this idea of showing a haircut at a barber shop came from Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter, who's also a great friend of mine. The scene with such details doesn't exist in the book. In the novel, Gogol is just remembering how his father shaved off his head at the time of Gogol's grand father's death. In films, we have to show the drama where Gogol takes actions to assert his newly revived traditions. I remember, I cried while reading Sooni's screenplay," Mira Nair confesses.

She adds with moist eyes, "Another of my favourite moment from the film is when the whole Ganguli family goes to the sea for a picnic. This is the time when Gogol is a small child. He remembers his father has gone far, close to the sea waves. His father wants to capture the moment, but realises he forgot to bring the camera with him. Gogol remembers the incident after his father's death. The whole sequence, shot in a kind of black and white photography, where Gogol's father says 'Gogol this is the last place on earth..there's no place left to go...,' is one of my favourite scenes in the film."

"I also like the ending of the film where we weave the past and present memories. Ashima says she missed India while living in the US and now that she's going back to India, she will miss America. I like the scene for its rhythm and originality. I also like the way we mixed Calcutta and New York cities into one big long memory.

"Now, I'm planning for my new film Shantaram, based on the best selling novel with the same title. Johny Depp will be playing the lead character of Shantaram. It's based on a true story- most of it is based in India, but filming will take me to Afghanistan and Australia as well. Amitabh Bachchan will play Kaderbhai, a character who's a father-figure to Johny Depp in the film. It's a huge challenge for me to portray the connection between east and west in an honest manner."

Indeed, it is as we know Shantaram is a big novel and to turn it into a 110 minute film with cross over appeal is no joke.

So 'crossover guys!', we hope you did finally get some tips.

PS: Mira Nair was born in the eastern city of Bhuveneshwar, India, in 1957. Her regular screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala was also born in the same year. Educated at both Delhi University and Harvard University, Mira Nair began her artistic career as an actor before turning her attention to documentary and feature filmmaking. She lives in the USA.

The Namesake: Home Page
Visit the home page of The Namesake to read the profiles of Jhumpa Lahiri and Sooni Taraporevala. Also, read the director's cut and detailed notes about the characters of the film. Click here.