The eyes have it
Her latest film Amelia is an expansive Hollywood production, her largest canvas yet. But Neha Bhatt finds that Mira Nair remains at heart the girl next door.
Her voice is unhurried and warm. “I woke up this morning thinking of Dev D,” chuckles Mira Nair over the phone from New York where she lives, when asked whether she follows Hindi cinema. “I watched My Name is Khan recently, and I liked it, and I want to watch Love Sex Aur Dhoka. I’ve heard so much about it,” she says excitedly. Nair hardly seems halfway across the world from home. But then again, as she reaffirms, the Rourkela-born Harvard-educated Nair has never felt like an immigrant. Many of her films, with their intricate Indian binding, are proof of that.
There’s no doubting Nair’s flair for mixed flavours, and this keeps her oeuvre buoyant, energetic, often unpredictable, moving fluidly from South- Asian themes to Western period dramas.
Her latest film, Amelia, an expansive Hollywood production starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, released in the US last October, and opened at theatres in India only a few weeks ago. The film chronicles the adventures of gutsy American aviatrix Amelia Earheart, who vanished along with her plane while on a flight over the Pacific in 1937. The film, despite visual grandeur and formidable casting, opened to largely unfavourable reviews. But Nair isn’t perturbed.“Film is such a public medium that once you’ve served the concoction you don’t want to dwell on public impact. I do understand the public wants my voice in films I make. But when it’s a film like Amelia it’s less my voice, and more my character,”she explains.
Amelia saw Nair at the helm of a larger-than-life canvas, perhaps her biggest yet.
We may, however, be more at ease watching her intimate, intricate dramas; utterly Indian, utterly rooted — be it family shenanigans in Monsoon Wedding, or life on the streets in Salaam Bombay. But Nair isn’t one to be stereotyped. “I feel a great sense of investment in any film, but with larger canvases and larger budgets, there are many cooks so there is a limited sense of freedom. But you have to rock and roll with the power you have,” she believes.
How does she engage with the Indian cinematic world after having lived abroad for over 30 years? “The Namesake (Nair’s film based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel by the same name) grew out of a personal loss. My films also stem from the fact that I come from documentary filmmaking, with the whole idea of capturing truth. Monsoon Wedding is intimate because it’s so much about the comings and goings in a family, and that is what my own life is about. The film also has bits of things I love about Delhi, such as Chandni Chowk. It’s beautiful the way things expand,” says Nair.
Our conversation spurs nostalgia. “I miss my family, my friends in Bombay, chaat, bhel puri, the heat. But then one creates a world around oneself. I still feel connected. We speak Urdu at home here. I keep coming to India,” she says. Nair also feels closely connected to Uganda, where she researched for her film Mississippi Masala, and where she met her professor husband. Nair is currently working towards building a film institute in Kampala, to supplement a summer film program called Maisha that she started there six years ago.
In New York, a typical day for Nair includes a few hours of writing, yoga, spending time with her son, husband and father-in-law (with whom she regularly attends film festivals) — and a spot of cooking, too. “I won’t travel till September, which is when my son leaves for college. A few hours of my mornings these days are spent developing the script of the Monsoon Wedding Broadway show with Sabrina Dhawan (who wrote the screenplay for the film). We’ve just finished Act 1. I spend a few hours in the afternoon working on the screenplay of Mohsin Hamid’s book The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for which I have bought rights. I go for yoga in the evening and then come home and make khichdi and kadhi for everyone.”
Nair is a “local storyteller at global cinema”, writes author John Kenneth Nuir in his book on Nair’s films, Mercy In Her Eyes. But she never felt the need to “break into” Hollywood, she stresses. “I was independent and I followed my instinct. Perhaps it’s having the sensibilities that I do that the studios came to me with Vanity Fair and then Amelia. I found an audience and that has been illuminating. But the struggle never lessens,” she says. “Sometimes one is just not inspired, or connected. I try to make something new each time. But it really doesn’t get easier because the heart of what you are trying to explore is elusive.”
At the end of the day — she agrees cheerfully — it’s the reaffirmation that her cinema has an impact that lasts longer than the few hours spent in the theatre that makes it all worth it.