Mira Nair

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Director Mira Nair has yet to achieve large-scale mainstream success, but by sticking to well-received, profitable independent films, she's become perhaps the most prominent Indian filmmaker working in the world today. Her first narrative film, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for the foreign-film Oscar back in 1988, and more recently, Monsoon Wedding became a surprise hit in 2001. After proving her range with 2004's Reese Witherspoon vehicle Vanity Fair, she's back with the Indian family drama The Namesake.

'When I pitched The Namesake, people just sort of assumed it would be like Monsoon Wedding, which I made very consciously for a million dollars, in a very lean way, and it turned out to be this big financial hit for everyone,' Nair says. 'They assumed The Namesake would be that lean. I said no no no, this is two continents, large cast, you know, a big, epic movie. One executive joked to me that it was a non-Caucasian film on a Caucasian budget.' She pauses for moment. 'Actually, I made that joke.'

Hearing her describe it that way, she's made something with the budget of a Matrix sequel. She lets slip later that the cost of the film was surprisingly minute ' the way she sees it, the cheaper the budget, the more control you have over your own film, since the studio is less worried about the investment. 'It's really important to have creative freedom. We raised the money from India, from Japan, and from Fox Searchlight, which was the way to have the creative freedom I wanted. But still, an ordinary romantic comedy here would cost about 25 million dollars, and this is a nine and a half million dollar film'so I do get a lot of bang for the buck. That's sort of my specialty.'

The Namesake tells the story of the Ganguli family ' from the young marriage of Ashima and Ashoke and their departure from India to New York, to their son, Gogol, as a young adult. It's a study of traditions, growing up in different cultures, and finding a loved one to spend your life with. 'I wanted to make a deeply exquisite love story, you know ' the story of the parents. It was a story I haven't seen often. It's about the stillness; about how you share a cup of tea on a kitchen table. And how you look at each other, and what that companionship and history means ' rather than the roses and the diamonds and the hallmark cards and the 'I love you's of this culture, and also of the young. So for me it was clear that the two pillars would be the adults and their love story, and then Gogol's coming of age would be the counterpoint.'

The film also has a wide-ranging but uniformly strong cast. 'I like to think that in this film an angel of casting flew over me, because a lot of the actors were supposed to be other people. The only person I was clear from the beginning was Irfan Khan [Ashoke], who I actually discovered eighteen years ago ' he was in my first film, Salaam Bombay, and I always looked for something that could do justice to his talent, and this was the role. Tabu [Ashima] is a great star, a great actress, and someone who I have known personally for many years. But besides her skill and her beauty ' her eyes. The map of life in her eyes, what she's seen in the world, that's something I can't direct. I can direct anything, but I can't direct what you have seen in the world.'

She also raves about Kal Penn, the unique choice to play Gogol ' he's mostly known for mainstream comedies like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. 'Kal is thanks to my fifteen year old son and his best friend, who twisted my arm'so he flew in and auditioned, and he really blew me away ' just so authentic, and he was so charming, and he had lived Gogol's life, practically. And because of his physicality, and his comic appeal, I could see that he could play the adolescent as well as the dashing young man, which is a very big key for a director, because otherwise I would've had to cast a younger Gogol, and that's very hard to convince an audience of, to have so many Gogols.'

Aside from her own work, she's also quite pleased with the state of Indian culture both in India and Stateside. 'I moved to [NYC] in 1979. Those days I was making documentaries, largely on Indian subjects, even then. It was a terribly lonely time. I didn't know who my audience was, I often had to spell India in my films, and people would say, 'Oh, there's running water in your films, you have running water in India'' Things like that would happen to me normally. And now, it's like you click on the internet, and there are South Asian playwrights, and reading groups, and film festivals'it's a very different time. There's a greater confidence.'

Down the road on Nair's plate is the big-budget Shantaram, with Johnny Depp attached to star. It will probably be the biggest budget she's worked with to date. Before that, however, she's involved in an ambitious project in India. 'I'm producing a series of four films, and directing one of them, and it's to raise awareness of AIDS in India. The series is called AIDS Jago, which means AIDS awake. It's four directors, doing twelve minutes each, with big Bollywood stars in each one, to make dramatic films on different aspects of the virus. And we're attaching each twelve-minute film to Bollywood blockbusters, so the masses at the end of the year will be seeing these films, and will wake up to what AIDS is.'

Overall, she seems content with having a lot on her plate. She talks about her career with a look toward the future. 'In India we have this philosophy that life is in for stages. There's the celibate, the youth; the householder; the karma yogi, the walker in the world; and then renunciation. And I feel that Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake very much reflect the solidarity between the second and third phase of life. Being in family; even experiencing death for the first time. Now I feel like I'm ready to return to the street.'