An astounding journey

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Mira Nair describes the days after the 9/11 attacks as nerve-racking. “Just the night before, I’d received the Golden Lion at Cannes for Monsoon Wedding,” the filmmaker recalls. “On the 11th, I flew to Toronto to open the film at the festival there. My husband and son were to fly from New York to me… The attacks were shocking.”

A decade after the attacks, Mira is being lauded for her latest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (based on the novel by Mohsin Hamid), which stars Riz Ahmed, Liev Shcreiber, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Om Puri and Shabana Azmi in key roles. “It’s been pretty astounding so far,” Mira says, as we chat over the telephone about the response to the film. “On Friday night I flew to India and opened up my email and there have been wonderful responses from all the critics.”
The appreciative feedback must be sweet indeed for Mira, who previously admitted that “at times it felt like the universe was conspiring not to get the film made”. The screenplay took nearly three years to perfect, the finances were almost non-existent, until the Doha Film Institute stepped in and funded the project. Still Mira was several million dollars short of the budget she had originally envisaged. “What kept me going, through those five years, was my music, the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and my son,” she says. “Faiz has this poem called Mori Araj Suno…hear my appeal, oh lord, and I would listen to it everyday. And my 21-year-old son, and my husband, they just wanted this movie to be made. Normally, like any other family, they don’t like having me gone when I’m working on a film. There were great sacrifices of separation this time too, but they kept me going.”
Apart from all the intangible support he provided, Mira’s husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, had a more practical involvement in the film as well. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, he has a cameo as a philosophising cab driver who strikes up a conversation with the protagonist Changez (played by Riz).
Mira laughs when asked if it took much convincing for Mr Mamdani to agree to do the part. “It’s sort of a family joke,” she says. “He never wanted to act, he never has time. He couldn’t understand how people can hang around for so many hours to do one thing. But he’s a real natural and it was a lark.” Mira narrates how the extras in the scene — there were about 60 of them — unaware of Mr Mamdani’s relationship with her, asked him how he’d managed to be the only one who got a talking part in the scene. “He told them, ‘I slept with the director!’” Mira laughs. “His agent of course, is our son. So the other joke in the family is that his agent somehow got him the lines!”
Mr Mamdani aside, Mira has worked with some of the most talented actors in both Hollywood and Bollywood, be it Denzel Washington, Reese Witherspoon, Hillary Swank, Irrfan Khan and Tabu. And while she certainly auditions extensively for her actors, there’s also been a certain amount of serendipity that’s helped her cast actors like Riz Ahmed and Sarita Choudhury (Mississippi Masala, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love). Mira says she’s hugely guided by her intuition when it comes to matters of casting. “There has to be something within them that would make me want to live with them for two years, sometimes more. My joke is that you have to be good enough for me to be interested in you for two years! I have to stare at them, work with them,” Mira explains.
She adds, “I usually continue to be close friends with all my actors.”
Something Mira’s also continued to do, through all her films, is what she calls “humanising the ‘other’”. It isn’t just in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, it also drove Mississippi Masala, Salaam Bombay. Mira says she’s had a problem accepting boundaries (between people) even as a young girl: “I always would question who decides who is good and who is bad. Who decides who is inside society and who is outside society. And on a creative and a human level, I’ve always been inspired by those considered marginal: Street kids, cabaret dancers or immigrants. In their stories of survival, there is deep resilience. They are most aware about the double standards of society.”
Mira once famously turned down a chance to direct Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix. What ultimately makes her choose the films she does? “The subjects compel me to do it,” she says simply. “They don’t let me go. The subject has to really get under my skin and possess me, and not in a narrow way. My films all have this ‘circus of life’ and encompass the many things I am interested in. Mostly my work comes out of my response to the things around me. And I don’t like to repeat myself — I like the adrenaline of risk.”