Mira Nair Interview, The NameSake

 Posted by: Sheila Roberts

Movies Online recently caught up with Academy Award-nominated director Mira Nair at the Los Angeles press day to promote her new film, “The Namesake.” In her most personal film to date, Nair (“Vanity Fair,” “Monsoon Wedding”) brings to the screen a poignant and transporting version of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling novel, which won reader’s hearts across the world with its exploration of the ties that can both tangle and bind global families as they brave the modern vicissitudes of change, conflict and disaster. The film’s screen adaptation was penned by Sooni Taraporevala, with whom Nair previously collaborated on “Mississippi Masala” and the Oscar-nominated “Salaam Bombay!”

“The Namesake” is the story of the Ganguli family whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to meld to a new world without forgetting the old. Though parents Ashoke and Ashima (Irfan Khan, Tabu) long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, they take great pride in the opportunities their sacrifices have afforded their children. Paradoxically, their son Gogol (Kal Penn) is torn between finding his own unique identity without losing his heritage. Even Gogol’s name represents the family’s journey into the unknown.

Jumping between the equally colorful and vibrant cities of Calcutta and New York, “The Namesake” is a family drama, but it’s about a very different kind of contemporary American family: the Gangulis, who come to the U.S. from India in order to experience a world of limitless opportunities – only to be confronted with the perils and confusion of trying to build a meaningful life in a baffling new society.

Mira Nair was struck speechless by the novel – in part because the story seemed to so closely reflect her own experience. “Here was the story of a young girl who traveled from Calcutta and wound up in New York City, which is almost precisely the same road I traveled,” notes the director. “I thought it was a deeply human story about the millions of us in America who have left one home for another and learned what it truly means to combine the old with the new.”

Nair’s films have often crossed cultures. She burst into the filmmaking world with “Salaam Bombay!,” an extraordinarily powerful tale of street children trying to survive in the slums of Bombay. She then radically switched gears and headed to the southern United States to direct the indie romantic comedy “Mississippi Masala,” starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhoury. Since then her films have leapt from one compelling territory to the next: from the 16th Century India-set romance “Kama Sutra” to the Golden-Globe winning HBO telefilm “Hysterical Blindness” set in 1980s New Jersey; and, more recently, from the evocative tale of a cross-cultural marriage ceremony, “Monsoon Wedding,” which won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, to her sumptuous screen version of the classic “Vanity Fair,” starring Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp.

Having just faced the death of a loved one herself, Nair felt a profound connection with the story of Lahiri’s novel. Nair explains: “I think out of all my films, “The Namesake” is probably the most personal. When I read Jhumpa’s book it was like I had just met a person who completely understood my grief, who knew the cocoon I was in and everything I was experiencing and I told myself that I must buy the rights immediately.”

Nair was also attracted to a unique chance to combine cinematic portraits of her two favorite cities on opposite sides of the globe: New York and Calcutta. “I saw an opportunity to unite these two equally exciting worlds that I know and love and have lived in all my life,” she says. “I also wanted to capture visually the dizzying feeling of being an immigrant where you might physically be in one particular space yet you feel like you are someplace else in your soul.” Here’s what Mira Nair had to tell us about her latest film:

Q: How did this project come to you and then how did you make it come full circle to America?

MIRA NAIR: Well I read this book kind of arbitrarily. I had bought the book because I loved Jhumpa’s (Lahiri) first book and for six months I didn’t open this book. I was finishing “Vanity Fair” and nursing my mother-in-law who lived with us. We lived with three generations at home in New York City. She was having a routine operation and she didn’t survive the after care. It was like a malpractice in a New York hospital. So we found ourselves burying her quite suddenly in a snow storm in New Jersey very far from East Africa where she had grown up, and I read this book in the six weeks into that mourning of losing her, and I felt such a shock of recognition that Jhumpa had understood what it feels like to bury a parent in a country that’s not your home. And so at first it was that complete feeling of solace in the story and then it was the fact that it was also a 30-year banquet of linking the two cities in which I had also grown up. I left Calcutta when I was 18 and came to this country. So I felt very much that I was born to make it and the plane landed and I called my agent and the rights were available and seriously a week later they were mine and about nine months later we were shooting the film. So I had two films I was supposed to make. I just put them aside. It was like a possession really.

Q: You mentioned it really is kind of similar to your story. Did you feel closure because of that?

MIRA NAIR: No, there’s no closure to my story in that sense, but I know that I came to making “The Namesake” because of experiencing death, because of experiencing loss and the finality of that loss for the first time. And I know that’s what prepared me to make this film and also that’s what actualizes the melancholy in the film because it came from life.

Q: There’s also a fascinating aspect which is the immigrant saga that we’ve seen repeated with so many cultures certainly in this country. Your upbringing has had you in many places as an outsider. Is there something uniquely American about that immigrant experience that each group seems to have to discover for itself?

MIRA NAIR: I don’t think so. I think that there is a real universality of any one of us who has left a homeland for another whether it’s a country or another city for another. I think the thing about coming to America is that America is this vast place made up of others like you who have come from other places, but there is at the same time a very appropriative quality of wanting to be American with a capital ‘A’. The interesting thing about the Ganguli family and “The Namesake” is that they have the parents who are very much in between worlds and then Gogol who burns to be American -- not Indian American but full on American -- and that is also a very interesting sort of push and pull.

Q: What about the scenes at the Taj Mahal. They’re so stunning. Is it easy to film there? Is that allowed? I don’t remember seeing it very much in films.

MIRA NAIR: You know India has changed a lot. We got permission to film quite easily in the Taj Mahal, but mainly because it was me and there was a certain sort of reputation that came with that. But we also only got one day and so it was pretty daunting to shoot in one day the whole sense of wonder about such an amazing building like the Taj Mahal. And I felt that I had… Every time I designed a shot I felt like it had been preordained by the workers who had built it because it is so layered and so amazing. So it was a very humbling [experience] when we ended the shoot of the film in the Taj Mahal which was a very nice way to go.

Q: When we spoke to Kal (Penn) a few weeks ago, he said that was his first visit to the Taj Mahal. Could you tell us about your first experience seeing it in person?

MIRA NAIR: I saw it as an eleven year old on a family car trip across India. We were going to drop my brother at boarding school and I remember being just knocked out by it because it’s truly like a lotus in the mud. It’s like this massive, white, glowing capital city. It’s like a city. It’s not a small thing in the middle of urban crazy Agra which is like any modern Indian city, you know. So it’s a startling thing.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about putting your cast together? I understand that you didn’t know Kal’s work before you cast him, and every time someone like Sukanya is in something, it’s hard to take your eyes off her.

MIRA NAIR: Well I love casting and I love casting non-actors with legends. I’m very open to mixing people from everywhere and certainly because the parents came from India I wanted very much Indian actors, not people who were residing here. So Tabu and Irfan are like major Bollywood stars. Tabu plays Ashima and Irfan plays Ashoke. I discovered Irfan when he was 18 years old. His first film was my first film, “Salaam Bombay!” So he was like a younger brother to me and I knew he would play Ashoke.
 
But I cast Tabu two weeks before shooting because the person I had cast had a problem with schedules and rehearsals so it was a very sudden piece of casting. But it’s like getting Meryl Streep to be in your movie in a way. Kal Penn was introduced to me by my 15-year-old son for whom he walks on water. You know he wrote me a letter saying he became an actor because he saw “Mississippi Masala” in the eighth grade and realized people on screen could look like him and other such seductive things for a director’s ears. He came and auditioned for Gogol just like anyone else and really made an impression on me because of his hunger to play it and his authenticity. He was a Gogol in his life.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about how you like to work with the actors and your preparation? Did you do read throughs and rehearsals?

MIRA NAIR: Yes. I think for me a very important thing as a director is to create an atmosphere that is really safe for us all to take chances and make fools of ourselves in the free hustle. There’s no one formula. Every actor their fragility is their power and my job as a director is to make them bloom and is to find the way into each person and each person has a different way in. Yes, we had a read through like a play with all the people in the film reading where I see how people look with each other and when you’re creating and casting a family, it’s vital that that is done carefully.
 
And then what I normally do is I take the two actors or the family into the space in which we are actually shooting like the weekend before and we just play. We just block it, walk through it, just the three of us. Then the director of photography comes in about an hour later and we actually block the scenes so that when we are shooting… Like this film took 6-1/2 weeks to shoot New York and 11 days in India and it’s an epic film. We’ve got so much in it, but it’s because you know exactly what you’re doing every day and you fly as you’re doing it so that the time and rehearsal is what I call cheap time. You know, you can talk endlessly, you can have questions, [clear] any cobwebs in your brain, and I get ideas seeing actors in that environment.

Q: You were very successful in revealing a lot of the story to the audience through the actors’ expressions and faces, unspoken and not through their dialogue, which was very economical.

MIRA NAIR: It’s all about economy and it’s all about removing the words because I don’t want to make quote quote foreign movies, you know, subtitled experiences, reading experiences. Cinema is to show you things, to reveal things to you, not to preach at you and talk to you, but it is to show you. So that was the idea. Even though there was scripting, we removed so much of the script while editing and in the performance.

Q: You talked about the universality of the story. How important is the specificity to making that universal?

MIRA NAIR: Vital, without that specificity and truth, there is no resonance. And the funny thing is that when you make something more specific and more local, it becomes that much more universal. It happens to me every time, and I recognize it. I think it has to do with trust and the audience knowing that you have gained their trust and they’re with you then for the ride.

Q: Do you think this film will be received differently in India than in America?

MIRA NAIR: Well, the film is opening on the 23rd of March in India in a big 150 screen release. I’ve just had some screenings there, and it’s just been rapturously received, I can’t tell you. I think we love to look at cinema as a journey, something to transport us to somewhere else. And this film -- there are so many myths of the West in Indian stories and Indian cinema -- but this film tells it more like it is with a lot of poetry and a lot of emotion. And everyone relates to it.
 
Everyone has lost someone, everyone has been a parent or a child, everyone has been somewhere in that tapestry that we show in “The Namesake,” so they relate. And like the lady said, there’s very little words, so it’s anyone. And I made this film like a shameless populist. I made this film to take families to because as a mother of a 15 year old, it is an insult to my intelligence those family films. There’s no film I can take my whole family to and enjoy – it’s very rare. So I wanted to make a film where I could take my grandparents and my teenager, and we could all get something from it that wouldn’t insult us, that would actually jam us and take us somewhere. So it would be seen like that as a film for the family.

Q: Did you talk to Kal about the importance of the scene where he’s shaving his head to this story?

MIRA NAIR: Yes, of course, but Kal is a very thoughtful person who has lived very close to that life. In fact, the shaving of his head was the first day of shooting, and that is a remarkably brave thing to do on screen, on camera, first day. And I remember being so struck by the focus in Kal, the focus in his eyes, the focus. He was so… It was like meditation. He was in meditation that day, and it’s amazing. And that is a scene that we invented. It’s not in the book. That is because the memory of remembering himself as a child laughing at his father’s bald head is in the book.
 
But those scenes where you go into a black barber shop and you… It’s a fashion statement for the barber, maybe, who’s into rap music. He’s into that moment, he’s into a trend, and he has no idea that what you are doing is part of a long tradition. And that’s what it’s like when you come from other places and things. Signs mean something else in different places, and yet each other doesn’t know each other. But it’s the way that you find that place where you appropriate the shaving of the head to help you in that anchoring and in that grief.

Q: The girl Gogol married was kind of on the wild side…?

MIRA NAIR: Sure, she was a bad ass

Q: Is that kind of rebellion going on in India now with the traditions still being so strong?

MIRA NAIR: But that’s life, too. India is full of a billion people and each one makes their own way. It’s not like there’s only one way to live. And she’s of course a ‘wanna-be French’ girl. She wants to be something entirely different, which is what this country also prompts in people. It’s all about inventing yourself. So yeah, that’s what I love about the story -- its unpredictability. You think that she’s going to be the perfect Bengali wife and she’s not. She’s as far from… The white girl would have been better for him, but that’s life. It’s rich and powerful and strange.

Q: Can you talk a little about how you staged the wedding night? It became almost surreal, almost a Bollywood moment. It was sexy, but not graphic.

MIRA NAIR: Yeah, I took a chance, I have to say. I wanted a goofy – I call it the ditzy dance moment – and I shot it in a way that if it didn’t work, it could be cut out. But what I wanted, when my kid was about five years old in India, the Macarena had just come out, and all the kids would stand out in the streets and they would do Macarena. And I thought, I want to do a dance in “The Namesake” where five years later or three years later, kids on the streets in Chile, or wherever, would be doing this ditzy dance from “The Namesake.” It came out of that goofy idea, but also because these were two kids who were Indian to look at, but who were a mixed bag of everything else.
 
The song is similar. It’s an old Indian love song, but it was remixed by a funky London-based African-style singer. So it was all a mixed bag, the whole thing, and it turned out really fun. So I left it in there and people love that scene, but that’s how it came up. These two kids would know they were supposed to do something on their wedding night, but they wouldn’t quite know how or why or what, so they’d wear their bathrobes and so something interesting and neutral and funny.

Q: Was this movie storyboarded in advance? I’m thinking in particular about the fantastic, painterly transitional shots that you had.

MIRA NAIR: No storyboards in my films. But ideas, very careful ideas. The idea to film Calcutta and New York City as if they were one city, because I feel there's a great synergy in the two cities. Because I also know these cities really well, but they're about bridges and rivers, and trams in one and traffic in another. And it was all about these... ‘The things that separate us also connect us’ kind of thing, you know? And also, a state of being of an immigrant looking through her window and seeing the Ganges and sort of the Hudson River is exactly what it's like. And so I wanted to give the audience that idea of maybe you don't know where you are now. And so once I sorted that out, which was early on in my thinking of how to film the transitions, that was a major key in how to shoot these cities.
 
So that's all in my head. And then we outlined it, then we find the bridges being the motif and so on and so forth. Other than that, I kind of have a visual binder of images that inspire me. And in this case, it was a lot of contemporary photography, like Raghu Rai, Raghuvir Singh, Garry Winogrand, Egleston. I mean, there were different images that people have made that I keep with me, and they spark off other ideas, and then I share it all with my team, and we take it further. Like the goddess coming down is a...She's the goddess Durga, the goddess of Calcutta. You cannot move anywhere without seeing her or her blessing. So I thought, ‘How can I make a Bengali film without a goddess, without Durga with me?’ And then it was an inspiration from the Christ figure in “La Dolce Vita” that was floating on the...you know, that Fellini uses. And I thought, ‘Well, he can do it, I can do it, baby! Let's have that goddess come down!’ [Laughs]

Q: What's your vision for your next movie, “Shantaram”?

MIRA NAIR: That is a sort of...I think of it as a spiritual action film. You know, it's an action adventure about the spirit. In the sense that there's this man who comes to India depleted of his esteem, of his honor, of his faith in himself. He's a convict and an escaped one, and an addict, and he meets people where he least expects to find honor, really. And he is taught through their example of people who live close to the ground, slum dwellers, a guide, an underworld lord who teach him what honor is, or how to live honorably, and how he then achieves that honor for himself.
 
So in a way, it's about this continuum between East and West, which I think the writer of the novel, Gregory Roberts, does beautifully. Because he's not a native, but he is subsumed in that culture. But then he finds out that the way to go home again, metaphorically and literally, is to recognize, to be accountable for yourself. So it's a beautiful tale, a sort of spiritual tale, but in a very hard action way, you know? But I'm really looking forward to it and honored to be asked to direct it.

Q: What's it like when Johnny Depp specifically asks for you to direct the film?

MIRA NAIR: It's nice. [laughs] It's very humbling. And he's also a really...I mean, we all know he's an extraordinary actor, but he's also a very...He has a great curiosity about the world. And he has an attitude that is very beautiful, because you see that he is just perfect to play Shantaram because he embodies already the fluidity between East and West. He's not someone who looks at the world one way only, you know? He's got that way of looking that is...And he's a very intelligent person.

Q: Are you doing a Beatles documentary, too?

MIRA NAIR: I am supposed to. I started the Beatles documentary six months ago, and now it's sort of backburnered a little bit because of “Shantaram,” so it'll take another year to finish. But yes, I am.

Q: How do you keep all these balls in the air?

MIRA NAIR: I do yoga. I stand on my head everyday, and I look at the world upside down and embrace the disorientation. [Laughs]

Q: How much time do you spend in India versus the United States?

MIRA NAIR: I spend just a few months in the year in India. It depends on the film. Now with this next film, “Shantaram,” I'm going to be eight months in India, for instance. But normally I spend eight months in New York City and three months in Kampala, in Uganda, in the summers, where we have a film school called Maisha for East Africans.

Q: With the state of modern technology, do you feel that anyone can make a film now?

MIRA NAIR: Yeah. Well, more than that, I think that...In East Africa, there is a great feeling of...Like we have a writing tradition, we have theatre, but films are made ‘over there’. [referring to Hollywood] And so I want to just destroy that notion, and say that if we don't tell our own stories, no one else will tell them. And the reason you see Africa on our screens often and almost always not made by Africans is because you're not allowed to dream in cinema in those places. There's no training. There's no possibility. So the idea was to create a kind of Sundance style lab where we give 24 fellowships a year to young people from four countries, and from South Asia as well. 80% of our scholarships go to East African countries, and then 20% from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. And then I get great mentors from Los Angeles to London to Hollywood to Bollywood who come as teachers and give three weeks of their time to work one-on-one with our students. So it's a very intense sort of boot camp for cinema.

Q: Why did you pick Uganda for this training program?

MIRA NAIR: I lived there, and that's what I mean about in Africa, you just don't have representation. And I thought, ‘Let me just do it exactly where I am.’

Q: Are you aware of the long running Pan-African film festival here in Los Angeles?

MIRA NAIR: I am. I know. I have friends who are in it, yeah.

Q: What's your take on “The Last King of Scotland”?

MIRA NAIR: Well, I think it was a bravura film, and I really think that Forest Whitaker captured something very deep and intelligent, also, about Amin. But it's also a tale that is told from the outside in some ways, and it's also one of the reasons that Maisha is important, is that we would tell it differently from the inside.

Q: So you think an African would have a different perspective on that story?

MIRA NAIR: Yeah, I think...Well, let me not get into that so much.

Q: Has Jhumpa Lahiri seen the film?

MIRA NAIR: Of course.

Q: And what does she think of it?

MIRA NAIR: Really, she just like loves this film, transported by it, and she sort of sobbed for like five minutes after seeing the rough cut long ago, and made me sob, too. [Laughs] And she's really just so...You know, the film is full of her own family and her grandfather's paintings and her own children, and it's very, very...I mean, I made it purposefully to be about the people that inspired the story for her. And she just loves the film.

Q: Thank you.

MIRA NAIR: Thank you so much for coming. Spread the word! Let them all buy full priced tickets to come and see “The Namesake”! [Laughs]

“The Namesake” opens in theaters on March 9th.

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