Mira Nair is one of the most acclaimed directors in the business today and the queen of crossover cinema, making a name for herself in both Bollywood and Hollywood. Recently she sat down with us to chat about life, films and her new movie, “The Namesake,” which opened this year’s Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose.
Q: What inspired you to adapt Jhumpa Lahiri’s book “The Namesake” to a movie?
A: I was really inspired by grief. I had just lost my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me — and that too very unexpectedly, in New York, [due to] malpractice in a hospital. We buried her in a snowstorm in New Jersey, and this was a woman who had spent her whole life in East Africa — and I had never before experienced the finality of death of a person close to me.
I read “The Namesake” six weeks into mourning, by chance, on a plane, going to India, at the end of Vanity Fair, and I felt such a shock of recognition of how Jhumpa had acutely instilled in what it felt like to bury a parent in a country that was not home. As soon as the plane landed, I called up my agent, the rights were available and a week later I was sitting across Jhumpa in my office in New York, who gave me the rights — and nine months later we were shooting this film.
Q: You have mentioned before that “The Namesake” is a very personal story; did you have similar experiences when you moved to the U.S.?
A: Not similar to Ashima, because I came as a student and was part of a larger institution. I did not come as someone else’s wife. But in so many ways having grown up in Calcutta, and then in New York City, I know these cities so very well and I know the state of looking outside your window and seeing instead of the Hudson River, imagining it’s the Ganges.
The in-between world of the Ganguli family is very much the state I’m familiar with, and so many things about how families are and how life in Calcutta was in the ’70s versus today’s Manhattan. I’m the mother of a 15-and-a-half-year-old, and I know what it’s like to raise an adolescent in this country and to feel the push and pull and of course I bring a lot of that into the film.
Q: In most of your films the “city” plays an important role, almost as a character in the film. How do you mange to get into the “soul” of the cities, be it Bombay in “Salaam Bombay” or Delhi in “Monsoon Wedding,” and now Calcutta and New York in “The Namesake”?
A: I have spent formative years of my life in Calcutta. I grew up in Orissa and I used to be shipped to Calcutta for every summer from the age of 8 till 17. And I also always had this Punjabi part — which is my “whisky-drinking” family from Delhi. But in Calcutta I would be a street activist and a street actor, which was a complete contrast, and a curious juxtaposition of the Punjabi scene and the intellectual, cultural Bengali side.
This story similarly is in two cities, New York and Calcutta, which I know like the back of my hand. So when I read the book I knew right away that I wanted to make a love-story about two strangers who fall in love with each other after they are married in a different place and the son, who had to exist in counterpoint to his parents, unlike the book which is much more about Gogol. For me it’s a seesaw, it’s that balancing act between parents and children that I was interested in.
To condense 30 hours of the two cities into two hours was by filming the two cities like one … because I really feel the same spirit in the two cities whether it be the bridges, the traffic, the trams or the subway, and I mix it up so that the audience too by the middle of it is not sure where they are, because that is how it is to be between worlds, that is how we live.
My background comes from the cinema of the street. I am a humble student of Cinema Verite so “Salaam Bombay” is about that, it is about the Bombaiya, what Bombay makes us become, and similarly “Monsoon Wedding” is completely about the chaos of my family dining table, and for me it has been fused with images that I love about Delhi — my Delhi is not just that one dining table, it has to be expansive. I also love the seesaw between comedy and sorrow, you laugh now because you have known sorrow before.
Q: What led you to cast Kal Penn (“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”) as Gogol, who at that time was better known for his comic roles?
A: My 15-year-old son worships him! And insisted that I cast Kal, so I was under a lot of domestic pressure!
I was shown Kal on the Web and I said, fine, he’s a goof, he’s a comic, but I’m looking for a dashing young man. Then Kal wrote to me telling me he became an actor because of me. He saw “Mississippi Masala” when he was 8 and realized that people on the screen could look like him. So I said, “Fly yourself down and we shall see.”
So when he auditioned for me in my office, I saw that he was deeply the real thing. He was like someone who had grown up as Gogol and was born as Gogol, and someone who had negotiated Gogol’s path exactly. He brought a certain kind of hunger and urgency. I’m not someone who is concerned with stereotyping. But yes, it was certainly a lot of pressure from the home front and I do thank him because he did such a wonderful job.
Q: What has been your experience as an Indian woman filmmaker in the mainstream world of Hollywood?
A: I feel I’ve always done my own thing, right from the beginning. In the beginning it used to be pretty lonesome, I did not know whom I was making films for. … Even in India, I started with documentaries and I had no audience for them. But I just do what I have to do and keep on doing it and now it actually amazes me that I have a “body of work” and I have an audience.
But the thing is, I never sought to be part of the A-list, I never was like, “I got to be as good as that guy.” It’s just … I have to do what I do, and in the process of doing that people come to me for my sensibilities. I feel so happy to now direct “Shantaram,” for instance, with actor Johnny Depp. …
But all this happened because of my work, which is authentic and really speaks — and also sells a lot of tickets.
