It can’t have been simple for filmmaker Mira Nair to bare her soul on stage and reveal her innermost thoughts while talking about her craft. However, that is exactly what she did, when she addressed a rapt audience at the ongoing Ficci Frames convention in Mumbai.
Mira began by talking about just how lucky she feels to be from India. “To be so rooted and have that grounding, whether from here or from Uganda — where I’ve settled down with my husband and in-laws — has been great. The inspiration for making a certain kind of cinema stems from here. It was quite confusing in my early years and I was see-sawing between my identities, but I finally began to understand that it is our very own stories that are truly international,” she admitted.
Born in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, and then going on to study at Harvard, Mira said the distance from her roots actually helped: “Distancing did help me make films. If you see poverty around you all the time, you are quite beaten by it — it remains at that. But if you look at it from a distance, the same poverty excites you, and you start thinking of narratives. Having said that, I don’t delve into nostalgia, I find it useless.”
Salaam Bombay, till date, remains Mira’s most celebrated work. And Mira agrees that it’s the one film from her repertoire that she is closest to. “I usually don’t talk about my work or how proud I am of it. But Salaam Bombay was something that stirred so much in this country — it impacted government regulations and policies at a time when it was difficult to even get the audience to watch this kind of cinema. I knew it would culminate into something that would not stop with just the release, and we went ahead and formed a trust which helps thousands of street kids today,” she said.
Mira’s latest release is The Reluctant Fundamentalist, adapted from the book by Mohsin Hamid. For over three years, Mira was consumed by the project even as it ran into obstacles, including its financing. She said, “I was tired of American films told from the American point of view. I was yearning to tell a story that was a dialogue with the West. This story moved me because here was a character who had achieved the American Dream and then felt betrayed by it after the 9/11 attacks. He deals with love, tragedy and betrayal.”
In one scene, the lead character smiles after watching the plane crash into the World Trade Centre towers. “That smile is a very complicated emotion: from believing in and achieving the American Dream and then realising that there is a certain way that he is going to be looked at by Americans finally,” Mira said.
Getting financial backing was tricky. “I decided not to go to the West, they would water it down,” Mira explained. “The film wasn’t just about political fundamentalism; it was also about economic fundamentalism. We wanted to make an unapologetic film, and I am glad we did.”
A filmmaker known to etch sensitive characters, Mira says they’re all people she would want to spend the afternoon with. She’s a student of life, she added: “That’s how I expand my knowledge. I choose a subject close to my heart and then my story in a distinct way.”
Mira said that the climate for cinema is changing in India. “Even though we still obey our own vocabulary, which restricts our audiences worldwide, we need to develop a sense of rhythm that is not long-winded. People now are embracing different kind of cinema,” said Mira, whose upcoming projects include a Broadway adaptation of Monsoon Wedding and a Disney film about an eight-year-old Ugandan girl who wins the Chess Olympics.