Quotes of the Day
Next time you hear someone complain they're too busy to be sick, mention the director Mira Nair. When we meet, she's launching a film studio in Bombay, preparing to shoot three movies in India, England and possibly Afghanistan, working on a Broadway musical and creating a film workshop-cum-garden with a view of Lake Victoria near Kampala, in Uganda—all in addition to being a long-distance mother and wife to her family in New York City. Meanwhile, she's been up all night in her Bombay hotel with viral flu and a temperature of 39°C. "I don't stand around chewing my nails," she grins. "That's the beauty of a full life."
At 46, Nair, whose much anticipated movie Vanity Fair opened in the U.S. last week, is already a veteran of four professions. After switching from university in New Delhi to Harvard at 18, she had ideas of being an avant-garde actor, "but when I got there, it was all Oklahoma!" She became a photographer's assistant (to first husband Mitch Epstein), then an award-winning documentary filmmaker before turning feature-film director at 30. Today she's also a producer, a film professor at Columbia University and a horticulturist so fanatical that it's beginning to affect her day job. "They've rewritten the script for [author Nick Hornby's] Fever Pitch, and I love it," she says. "They've signed Drew Barrymore. But they want to do it next month, and I have to return to my garden. They can't believe that's the reason I can't do it."
Even as a director, Nair has had enough triumphs and troughs for a couple of lifetimes. She made her debut in 1988 with Salaam Bombay!, a story of street kids that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film. In 1991 came Mississippi Masala, a critically acclaimed interracial love story starring Denzel Washington. But that was followed in 1995 by The Perez Family. Despite a cast of Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Marisa Tomei, critics panned the film, with The New Yorker deriding it as "almost unwatchable." Her next movie Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love was universally skewered, and even Nair disowned it as an "aberration." In 1997 she moved to South Africa with her second husband, Mahmood Mamdani—now an anthropology professor at Columbia—to look after their son Zohran and, it seemed, to withdraw from directing into the life of a suburban housewife.
But after a three-year hiatus, Nair had a second coming. Scraping together $1.2 million from investors in India, France, Germany and Italy, she returned to what she knew best—family and India—and filmed Monsoon Wedding in New Delhi in the summer of 2000. Working with a handheld camera, she captured four scenes a day, completing the entire shoot in just one month—despite losing five days' worth of film to an airport X-ray machine. Giddily enjoyable but unsparing in its treatment of darker subjects like infidelity and pedophilia, Monsoon Wedding was the budget hit of 2001, topping the foreign-film box office in the U.S. and taking $30 million worldwide—the most ever for an Indian film. "Monsoon Wedding was so rich with emotion and color," says Juliette Lewis, describing why she signed to star with Uma Thurman in Nair's 2002 HBO production Hysterical Blindness. "I'm always looking for the freshest filmmakers out there, and there this was, almost an epic, with the universal human appeal of a family drama and with Mira's distinct visual style." Hysterical Blindness, about the loves and loneliness of three women in 1980s New Jersey, picked up three Emmys and a Golden Globe.
With a $23 million budget and cast that includes Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne, Nair's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair is her biggest film yet. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, the 1820s London social climber who set the bar by which such mountaineers would forever after be measured. The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray's Indian influences—he was born in Calcutta—including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the "outlandish" sight of Witherspoon doing a "grinding Indian-flavored hoochy-cooch, worthy of Britney Spears," saying it seemed "shoehorned in from another movie." The Hollywood Reporter praised such "Indian touches" as an "intriguing, fresh approach" but complained that the film has "too much plot and far too many characters."
Indeed, throughout her career, there's been criticism that Nair, despite her gift for lush and stylish spectacles, crams too much onto the screen and tends to lack depth. She claims not to care: "My feeling is that I do what I do, then I offer it to the world. I hope people will be affected by it, watch it and are impressed. I aim to put bums on seats. But that's not to say that I'm confident or unconfident. I don't think about the fruits of my actions. I just do the work."
It's tempting to trace this never-look-back attitude to Nair's childhood. She was born into a middle-class civil servant's family in Bhubaneswar, a dirt-poor city in eastern India that is usually given a wide berth by tourists. "Even in Indian terms, it's really remote," she says. Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child—or, as she puts it, a "contraceptual blunder." In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent his wife Praveen to a clinic for an abortion, but she couldn't bring herself to go through with it.
Nair proved to be an unusually precocious child—top of her class and a leader to her elder brothers. Then came her first experience of theater, in festival dramatizations of mythic Hindu tales. The performances "possessed my mind," she recalls, and also provided a means of escape, allowing her to act in plays in New Delhi. By 18, studying and performing at university in the Indian capital, Nair was applying to every U.S. college she could think of, already displaying the resolve and energy that would mark her life. Mamdani describes film as Nair's ideal medium. "Mira often says she left documentaries for fiction because she got tired of waiting for things to happen." The role of the headstrong itinerant is not without a price, however. Time and again, Nair returns on screen to themes of displacement and immigration, the ache of exile. "The parallels between her and Becky Sharp are amazing," says Witherspoon. "She had so many experiences of being an outsider, being a foreigner in a foreign country."
Nair claims to be mellowing. "I find I am less restless now," she says. For two years, she has started each day on set with a yoga session. But for true calm, it has to be the garden. "To think I would ever get excited about watching something grow," she says. "It teaches you about rhythm and patience." Despite such claims, she still likes to introduce herself with the line "I'm Mira Nair. Rhymes with fire." And her schedule for 2005 suggests she's far from ready to cool down. She's working on adaptations of The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, The Namesake by Pulitzer winner Jhumpha Lahiri and Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul. She's setting up the International Behenji Brigade, a Bombay production house with the backing to make three low-budget Asian movies, and Maisha, an annual "filmmakers' laboratory" in Uganda for screenwriters and directors from East Africa and South Asia. And then there's the small matter of transforming Monsoon Wedding into a $14 million musical, complete with a wedding tent that Nair plans to assemble over the audience during each performance.
Then again, Nair's best work is often her most frantic. She shot Hysterical Blindness in just 28 days—two days faster even than Monsoon Wedding. "It was 17-hour days for four weeks," says Lewis. "Mira's eyes were just wide and beaming through all of it. She's the most visionary director I've ever worked with." Naseeruddin Shah, who plays the father in Monsoon Wedding, adds: "She's a dynamo. We'd be filming at 3 a.m., and she'd still be generating this energy that affected us all." Vanity Fair star Witherspoon was similarly struck by Nair's zest for the intensity and chaos of filmmaking: "We shot in India for three days, and she had 300 extras, two elephants, four camels, and she was directing in Hindi and in English, and she did it without breaking a sweat."
To Nair, "energy and obsession" are everything. "I've always worked independently," she says. "Vanity Fair has a Hollywood budget, but it's completely an independent filmmaker's film." These days, she's regularly courted by Hollywood, but the turbulence of her career has taught Nair that her flavor-of-the-month status won't last. In any case, Mamdani says, that isn't the objective. Nair is "driven more by passion than ambition," he says. This has afforded her a rare artistic license in what is often a timidly conventional profession. "When I have passion for something," says Nair, "I'm a weirdly kind of fearless person." Indeed, Mamdani explains Nair's yoga and gardening not as gentle forms of distraction but as a means of reinforcing her calm confidence and enabling her to be a willful visionary amid "the corrupting influence of the marketplace, particularly when [she is] successful in it."
True to form, Nair's vision of her future is as exuberantly eccentric and visually eye-catching as her films. "When I am 50," she declares, "I want to be standing in a beautiful, open, rustic space with a view of Lake Victoria with a group of extraordinary filmmakers, all of whom know how to do a headstand." As always with Nair, it promises to be quite a spectacle.
- Alex Perry | Bombay
- Mira Nair, Indian director of the surprise hit Monsoon Wedding, releases her biggest movie yet