Enrique Cerna Interviews Mira Nair

Enrique Cerna Interviews Mira Nair

This is a transcript of an interview with Mira Nair on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on October 19, 2009.

Enrique Cerna: Mira Nair, thank you very much for being a part of conversations, and welcome to Seattle. You been here several times?

Mira Nair: Yes I have. I love this city.

EC: And when you come here it is usually to talk about the films? Do you get a chance to spend any time here?

MN: Not enough. I really want to come here to be in nature more than in hotel rooms. Usually it’s hotel rooms and interviewing for opening of new film, but it’s such a passionate audience here in Seattle for films and generally.

EC: Film and books…they are interested in artists.

MN: It’s a greatly embracing city.

EC: You know, much talk about Slumdog Millionaire this year and its success at the box office and at the Oscars, but 21 years ago, you came out with a film that really was a classic, called Salaam Bombay, and it was about the life of street kids in Mumbai. That film—it really set the stage and opened the door and launched your career as a future film maker. Tell us about the legacy of that film—all these years later.

MN: Well it was a film unlike any film that we had made in India or a lot of places in the world at that time. And I see it now, and I don’t really see my work so much, but when I saw it a few years ago I just felt so honored to be the vessel from within where it came because it’s unusual. I used to call it a life and death movie—a movie…we had nothing, but a good idea and street kids who were just extraordinary in terms of the maps of life on their faces in their hearts.

And screen play that really came from their own truths and our own imaginations. Yeah, I am very proud to have it live on as a classic. This is its 21st year and we are re-releasing it in India in a few months and also I hope in this country.

EC: And there is a realness in this movie because of the fact that these are the real kids.

MN: Yes.

EC: Tell me how you went about finding them and about the challenges of doing a film with these kids.

MN: Well I had come from about seven years of making cinéma vérité documentaries, and in the process of that got to know a gang of street kids, rag pickers, in Bombay and my friend Sooni Taraporevala who wrote the screenplay and myself, much like our documentary work, hung out with these kids for four months and made a screen play as an amalgam of their stories and what we had observed in our imaginations and then had a work shop for about 130 street kids in a basement church of downtown Bombay and chose 24 of those kids and had a 6 week period of time with these kids, all of whom are in the movie.

A workshop that ranged from doing yoga, dancing, debating, bringing issues that were important to them, and finally bringing the screen play into the mix and then chose two professional actors to play the prostitute and the pimp and designed an entirely fictional film, but based on the reality of these kids lives and because we had the power of working with the kids themselves, there is a great truth and authenticity to it.

EC: Now 21 years later, are you still in contact with those kids?

MN: Yes. Actually we took the profits from Salaam Bombay, which were quite immense at the time, and created Salaam Baalak Trust, it's a non-profit to help street kids. It’s the first privilege I have had, with that film, to impact government policy on street kids. Salaam Baalak Trust trust is now 21 years old. We have 17 centers in Bombay and Delhi and we have more than 5000 kids a year come through our center and a number of the kids who made Salaam Bombay who now have their own kids have either worked or be with our centers.

EC: Now, as I understand it, with your work and your success, as you said, you have put money back into your community, you’ve even been involved with some other projects that have done short films with other Indian directors really aimed at the issue of AIDS within your country.

MN: Yes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came to see me about two years ago talk about the rising numbers of HIV/AIDS in India and because our population is so immense, you know, it could amount to a pandemic it there wasn’t greater awareness in our own society about this disease. I also live in Uganda, which is very familiar with the HIV/AIDS problem and have lost a third of the intellectual community to this disease and have faced it very close at hand.

So I immediately said to them that India we love cinema, we worship our actors almost like gods, so what if four directors very commercial directors, got together and made four short films using movie stars, recognizable people, and made with total creative freedom, each an aspect of the disease and I called it AIDS Jaago, which means "AIDS Awake," and they asked me to direct one, so I made one called Migration which was about the virus as the great class leveler of our society, which is riddled with the highs and the lows in India, but the virus knows the know no class. And I asked Vishal Bhardwaj who had done wonderful films like Maqbool and Omkara to do one and Farhan Akhtar, to do another and Santosh Sivan from the south, to do a third.

We had a series, like an 18 minute series and it plays on television constantly and it is now available everywhere on DVD and it has just gone around the world and it’s pretty interesting.

FROM ALISA, INDIA TO HARVARD

EC: Obviously, you have set a standard in filmmaking, not only in your country, but around the world, but in your country, films are so passionate and there’s this color and this passion and this desire. Why? What is it about the Indian filmmaking that brings out all these energies?

MN: Well, we come from an extraordinarily vibrant culture and a culture that was at least in the earliest years had a very, exiting, vibrant, mythological, theater traditions, where our holy books were brought to the people village by village with traveling players. This is a complete part of our lives and that gave rise to Indian mythological films that for 100 years we celebrated in the Indian film industry and that morphed into the great big song and dance extravaganza and the Indian movies were the primary source of entertainment, and in a country as vast as India, it was a very uniting force as well.

Soon after Indian independence, it was great secular cinema. It became our oxygen. There was no other art form that met the craze that Indian audiences have for cinema, and of course cinema has changed to now because of distribution and because of having multiplexes, it is becoming much better quality in terms of projection, to all kinds of cinema, like alternative kinds of cinema—like I come completely not from Bollywood. It is much more an expression of my own vocabulary, but I have a big audience in India, so it’s a very exciting time now as lower budget and experimental projects are coming in the market and audiences are clearly wanting that.

EC: So what did you think of Slumdog Millionaire?

MN: I would rather spend my time speaking about my work.

EC: That’s fine. We can do that. [laughs] Let’s talk about you as an artist and how this came about. Where were born?

MN: I was born in a small town called Rarkila in Alisa, an eastern state about 300 miles south of Calcutta where my father was a civil servant and so pretty remote, even by Indian standards.

EC: And was there a theater in the town?

MN: There was one cinema and it played only one western film, Dr. Zhivago, every Sunday morning and even if the electricity was on the blink, there would be silent images of the Siberian snowy escapes and sweating Indians looking at them, but my first inspiration came from this traveling mythological theater, where actors who had nothing except the stories of the sages would absolutely transport us, without props, without lights, without anything to these tails of good or evil. That was my first inspiration that led me to become an actor in street theater in Calcutta and that led to coming to Delhi University and becoming more active in semi-professional theater as an actor.

EC: Did you want to become an actor?

MN: You know I felt intuitively happier on stage, but I really didn’t like not having control, over my own existence. An actor, alas, has to be at the mercy of a director normally. I wanted to engage in the world, and hopefully change it, idealistically and you need to do more than to be an actor, to do than. I mean, you can do that actor, but only if you are really at the peak of fame or whatever.

That led me to become a filmmaker, but I just stumbled into it, because I had a scholarship, I came to this country. I had to study at this university and drama was not really exiting.

EC: You were 19 when you came here?

MN: I came at 18 and a half, 19 almost.

EC: And that university was Harvard, where you got a full scholarship?

MN: Yes. Yes, I did. It was uncanny. I got one of those stamped envelopes in my village box.

EC: That’s a sweet deal. So when you went to Harvard. Talk about that experience. I mean, many of your films are about the kind of this cross cultural relationships. It had to have been an eye opener for you to go to Harvard.

MN: You know, in India we are brought up with a huge world view. You know, much greater view of the world than the world has of us, to be honest. So, yes, to see snow for the first time, to come to cross the oceans for the first time, it is an eye-opening thing. But the astonishing thing was the people I met at Cambridge were often sometimes more sheltered than I was. They were from, you know, Indiana and they were like agog at being on the East coast. So I wasn’t culture shocked because I knew a lot more things about the American life, like we had protested the Vietnam War already. I knew strange things like all the lyrics of The Beatles and all sorts of things, you know.

EC: You probably knew more about our history than most Americans know because that usually is the case half the time.

MN: Well Americans don’t study geography. Let’s face facts. So you don’t really know where people come from because you don’t know where that is.

EC: So at Harvard, at what point did you make this transition into, wasn’t it at first in documentaries?

MN: Yes, my junior year, I discovered, you know, Ricky Leacock was one of the founders of the cinéma vérité tradition, of the mobile camera shooting, and I took my courses with him and then really became a major in visual studies my junior/senior year. Made my first film in India a thesis film. But so it was there really. And then once I graduated, I moved to New York and tried to raise money to and make films in India and did for about 7-8 years making documentaries.

EC: That transition from documentaries into features was it a bit freeing I guess maybe to go from. You know, documentaries, they take time. And if you’re finding those right characters and sometimes you’ve got to live with them for quite a while, was it different? Were you looking for something as giving you an escape?

MN: Well I was tiring of waiting for things to happen as you have to do in making cinema verite. You have to sit there with people who you learn to be comfortable with you and film as their life unfolds and its really testing of patience. But I also more than that wanted to control narrative and story telling and light and gesture and those things. Aesthetic things as well. But over and above that frankly I wanted an audience. And those years of early eighties documentaries it was before Bowling for Columbine, before the big commercial documentaries. You had to strive for an audience.

It was pretty lonesome taking my films under my arm on a Greyhound bus for six weeks in this country. Any one who wanted me, I would go and show my films, you know. Two or three hundred dollars a pop. Universities and woman’s groups and that would be interesting, but would also confront people who generally didn’t have a clue about my country and in India it was no vocabulary to see documentaries. So I was neither here nor there. And there is a great lesson of that you have to train to be lonely to be an artist in some ways.

Even though I never called myself an artist till many years later. But still. But it was that desire to have an audience and that’s what lead me to make Salaam Bombay the way we made it which is really an amalgam of documentary in that I used the real street kids to play themselves, used the locations as they were, but chose and did the story in very conscious ways, but and it got me an amazing audience.

EC: And it opened that door…

MN: Oh my God it was…

EC: For you to go on and do these, and 21 years later we still talk about it.

MN: Oh, thank you for that because I really feel grateful, I mean really amazed that it is such an alive film.

EC: It is.

MN: And you know, and it was a very brutally hard film to make, but the doors, not only the doors that have opened for me, but really also for the street kids. Just how it impacted how the society looks in regards to the children is a very very real thing

We have changed brick by brick people’s lives. One of our kids just won a fellowship from the Maybeck Foundation. Vicky Roy is his name. He was sort of, grew up in our centers in Delhi and he’s a photographer and he won the six month fellowship to come photograph Ground Zero. And he’s living in New York now. He’s about 18 years old and I see him every weekend.

And he’s just, oh my God, I can’t tell you. He’s like, he just is on another, I mean he’s found his voice, you know. And he’s a street kid, who was once a street kid and now still belongs to our centers but has now found his voice and that’s a big thing.

EC: But to know that you had a part in his life that has to be…

MN: Nothing, nothing can touch that I tell you. It’s the greatest antidote to Hollywood and this kind of struggle for ambition. The greatest antidote is to see one life changed or if not more, you know.

Similarly, five years ago I set up Maisha, which is a school for filmmaking and directing and screenwriting in East Africa where I live in Kabala for students from Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda and we come together all year, but in the summer it’s a boot camp for cinema and about 48 fellowships we give out. And we, I ask mentors, great writers and directors from all over the world.

From Nigeria, from Bollywood, from London, from Los Angeles and they come and work one on one with our students. Because if we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will and living in East Africa part of the year as I do, you never see a film on screens in the world which reflects the dignity or power of that life. Africa is always a backdrop to some white person having neurosis. You know, I dream of Africa, you know, it’s more about Kim Basinger than an absolutely nameless African country.

So this is what will carry on unless we say that we are telling these stories. But to tell them beautifully, not just to them like as a social welfare, but really to tell them with craft and excellence. So that for me really, fifty percent of what we do at Mira by Films, my little company is Maisha and Salaam Baalak, you know. And fifty percent is doing my own films and now my new film which is Amelia which is coming out in October.

MAKING MOVIES...

EC: I heard you describe Amelia, it’s about Amelia Earhart, and Hilary Swank, who actually grew up in the Bellingham area, is the lead in this. I heard you describe that as a brutal film to make.

MN: Well, I meant to say that it’s real epic and I wanted it to be. I wanted to recreate her final flight which was literally around the world and we flew. We made an aerial adventure film. Literally around the world. So in that sense it was brutally painstaking, but brilliantly satisfying.

But I don’t, didn’t want to fall into the pitfalls of classic conventional biopic, you know, beginning, middle and end, but to make a film about this radical woman who dreamed to fly and then achieved it and then sort of had a dance with death at the same time you know. But it’s about a very modern idea of how we try to achieve a balance if we can, between what we are passionate about and what our responsibilities are.

EC: Let’s talk about some of the films that you have made. Mississippi Masala, you made that with Denzel Washington. What was it like meeting him for the first time and I guess talking to him about doing this movie. I think hadn’t he just won an academy award for The Glory when this happened?

MN: Well, also the reason I could meet Denzel was because he loved Salaam Bombay. I think there’s nothing more affecting than if someone likes your work. And he also was very intrigued by the unusualness of our story of Mississippi Masala. Of an African American in Mississippi who had never known Africa as home. Falling in love with an Indian African Indian from Uganda who had never known India as her home coming to Mississippi and what if love would unite these two communities that were actually deeply similar to each other but were separated completely?

By culture by religion by everything, by society. So he knew, Denzel’s smart and he knew that this kind of unique storyline doesn’t happen often and he loved the first film so it was wonderful that he said yes. But even with Denzel it was difficult to raise money at that time: 1989/1990.

EC: Because it wasn’t the typical Hollywood fair?

MN: Yes it was not typical Hollywood fair and besides myself and Spike Lee and a couple of very few others, there were no tales on the screens who was essentially non-white. So I had absolutely blunt appeals made to me by money financiers. You know, saying, give us a white protagonist and we’re there, you know.

EC: Really?

MN: Yeah, and I would say, I’ll give you all the waiters will be white and we’ll be fine. And that will be fine you know. It was very interesting. It’s a cutthroat world, the movie financing world. They are very straightforward with you about what will sell, but we defeated them and showed this could sell too, basically.

EC: Is it still a battle?

MN: No, it’s not a battle for me in terms of raising money for my films. I’m blessed and have always more on my plate than I can do.

EC: You’ve got the track record now.

MN: I’m pretty much doing only my own work, but it is still a big battle generally speaking for a world view to come into cinema in the American screen. It’s getting increasingly more difficult to have the foreign film be released. Increasingly more pressured to make the blockbuster versus the political tale. Those classic struggles remain. The pie, although it gets bigger with more money, has it in the hands of fewer people.

EC: You made a movie called Monsoon Wedding and you made that in 30 days.

MN: That’s right. That was the experiment of it.

EC: Oh really?

MN: Yeah.

EC: Was that to either to prove to yourself or to show others that this could be done?

MN: I was teaching at the time, teaching students saying you can make something out of nothing and to prove to myself also that I could do the same even after 12 years of making bigger films and epics and so on. Can I go back to the lean and not-so-mean fighting machine? [laughs] So I raised, just on a premise that let me raise a million dollars, which was easy to raise and was the budget of Salaam Bombay…actually the budget of Salaam was 860 [thousand], but that was already 12 years before. So a million bucks, 30-days shooting, then let’s write a story that we can then put into that format. But then when we started to conceive of the story, Sabrina Dhawan—the writer, and myself, we made a very beautiful and complicated, layered, ensemble of five different stories of love and so on, but the premise was 30 days.

So yeah, we did it, and it was very interesting the gift of it because we had two weeks of workshops again—a lot of non-actors and a lot of legendary actors, but we all did a workshop to make this family work. Then I dressed the main set, which was one house, from crockery and cutlery and everything from my own family and once it was dressed we rehearsed the actors in an inventive way with a handheld camera so that when we were actually shooting, two weeks later, we used to do eight or nine pages a day like television, but the idea was to make visually inventive and not television.

A great dividend of this rehearse and keep on shooting kind of energy was the actual energy of the actors on screen, which I didn’t see until after I finished the shoot and then saw. That was just “wow!” The urgency and the kind of wit and humor and the sharpness of everything. It was one of those great gifts, but I still thought I was making a little family flick—and I was, but I didn’t have any idea it would reach so many millions of people and how many people would think: this is their family.

WHAT’S NEXT

EC: What’s next for you?

MN: Well, I’m still toiling, finishing Amelia. Then we are doing two big projects. Monsoon Wedding, in fact, I’m taking it to Broadway as a musical with a host of amazing partners.

EC: Oh wow.

MN: Steve Sater, who just wrote the lyrics of “Spring Awakening,” is doing the lyrics and Bill T. Jones is choreographing and we’re bring a whole bunch of amazing artists to reinterpret the film onto stage and I’ll probably direct it. Then the next film we are making is The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid’s book, a Pakistani writer who lives in London, on a young man from Lahore in Pakistan who comes to Princeton and has a love affair with America and how the world changes and how he begins to question again his relationship between his country and where he is now.

It’s really much more about this schism I see in the world increasingly: about those who have one way of life and those who have another. The terrible misunderstandings and the terrible, what can I say, the terrible devastation that’s happening in the world between the two ways of life. The Reluctant Fundamentalist really seeks to kind of go into that world where you are asked a question. Why are things the way they are? What happened here? But also to show, from our point of view, what is happening because again, the media…

It’s the same case with the Vietnam War. If you see the films on Vietnam they will always tell you—you rarely hear it from a Vietnamese point of view. You’ll always understand it, and understand it deeply, from an American point of view, but similarly in this war against Iraq and Afghanistan—what’s going on in the world—I want to hear it from both sides of the equation and The Reluctant Fundamentalist gives me that window.

EC: And you’re hoping to shoot in Pakistan.

MN: I hope so, inshallah.

EC: It could be a challenge.

MN: I increasingly am so filled with despair at what’s going on in that society at the moment and I hope for something to settle. Wherever I shoot it, it will evoke. Inshallah Pakistan.

EC: “Inshallah” means God willing?

MN: If God is willing, yes.

EC: If God is willing, right. My mother used to say: “Dios te bendiga”—“well, God bless you.” So in your case, if God’s willing. [laughs]

MN: [laughs]

EC: Thank you for your time for a very fascinating conversation and the best of luck in everything you do.

MN: Thank you so much, Enrique.