As her new film shows, Mira Nair loves the 'quizzical things' resulting from cultural misunderstanding. She talks to Donald Clarke.
Thirty years ago, Mira Nair, the director of Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding and, now, The Namesake, left her home in India to take up a scholarship in Harvard. At this stage, immigrants from the sub- continent were thin on the ground and she found herself being handled as an exotic novelty. After only a few minutes exposure to Nair - gregarious, forthright, articulate - it becomes clear that she is not the sort of person to let such treatment get her down.
"I was one of only three students at Harvard that year," she reminisces. "People had no idea about the country. They'd ask me how I learnt English. They'd ask if we had running water. So I would play along and say elephants dropped me to the airport. I would claim I lived in a treehouse. They wouldn't even get the joke. Things are somewhat better now in the big cities and colleges, but I suspect that it is the same in the Midwest."
She has now opened the floodgate on a whole stream of memories. Nair, whose father was a civil servant in Rourkela, recalls being exposed to proper winters for the first time. Until this point, extreme cold was something that happened to other people.
"It took me three years to learn how to dress for the winter," she laughs. "I had never had to deal with cold. I can remember wearing a cotton sari while trudging through the snow. I had never seen melting ice before. I just didn't know how to feel in winter."
Listening to Nair speak, it becomes clear why Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, an admired novel from 2003, attracted her interest. The book begins with a recently married couple from Calcutta making their way to New York City, where they experience many of the discomforts that Nair remembers. The story goes on to follow the life of the couple's son, Gogol, as he grows up to embrace and then question the values of American society. Beautifully shot in rich shades, Nair's film version has endlessly fascinating things to say about the immigrant experience.
"I was interested in evoking a kind of stillness," she says, enigmatically. "It is not to do with the manic nature of youth. The book is very emotional and it is to do with the emotions that come from confusions in modern society. Gogol goes to shave his head when he is in mourning, because he remembers his father doing that. But the barber in New York thinks he is doing it to be cool. I love those quizzical things that happen when one is misunderstood culturally."
Among the film's achievements is the way it conjures up lush images of 1970s New York and contemporary India on a fairly minuscule budget. The Namesake, which offers Kal Penn, star of such lowbrow romps as Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies, his first serious role, never betrays the compromises that must have been endured during its production.
"Well, that's my reputation," Nair says. "I am known for delivering epics for peanuts. The trick is to know exactly what you want and maximise every moment. The focus had always to be on the transition between the two cities. What you see is pretty much everything we shot. One and a half scenes were cut. That's the old immigrant training, I think. You make do with what you have."
BEFORE NAIR GOT to experience that immigrant training, she was a middle-class student at a Catholic school run by Irish nuns. Happily, she has no horror stories to tell of her education and, indeed, reveals that she positively begged to be sent off to board with the sisters. Her parents focused most of their attention on her brothers and, thus, had little time to become concerned when, later, Nair showed signs of drifting towards the stage. They did, however, make a tentative attempt at an arranged marriage.
"There was just that one attempt," she laughs. "The heads of this big industrial family wanted to see me for his son. My parents made the mistake of telling me this. These meetings usually happen at weddings. So I borrowed the most outrageous, flouncy gypsy skirt and took one brother on one arm and another on the other and walked up towards this potential father-in-law and said: 'Meet my two boyfriends. I have no idea who to sleep with tonight.' That was the end of that."
Nair first studied theatre at Harvard, but, disconcerted by the lack of political engagement among the students and teachers, soon developed an interest in documentary film-making. Heartfelt pictures such as India Cabaret, an investigation of her country's sex trade, followed. Nair and Sooni Taraporevala - a friend from Harvard, who went on to co-write most of her projects - were, however, busy marinating a concept that would bring documentary techniques together with drama. The result was 1988's Salaam Bombay!. A searing, discomforting story of Bombay's street children, the picture managed to escape the art house and become a modest success in commercial cinemas the world over. Now that 20 years have passed, she has had time to consider why the film touched so many hearts.
"I think it is the force of authenticity," she says. "It is just very well told. Nothing like that had been seen coming out of India before. I saw it the other day with some students for the first time in 15 years. Watching the film, I was reminded that I was just a vessel for a story that had to be told. I was just there to help it happen. The synergy was right in every regard, and that is very rare in film- making."
Following the success of Salaam Bombay!, which was nominated for an Oscar, Nair was deluged with the expected waves of dull, obvious scripts from Hollywood. As she tells it, for a year or two, every screenplay involving children was directed towards her letterbox.
UNDAUNTED, SHE PERSEVERED with a series of decent, if unspectacular, films. Mississippi Masala, a story of Ugandan immigration to the American South, starring Denzel Washington, was released in 1991. Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, whose title reveals multitudes, was banned in both India and Pakistan on its release in 1996. It was not until 2001 that she had another hit to compare with Salaam Bombay!. Monsoon Wedding, a busy, vibrant picture dealing with a wedding in Delhi, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and, like Salaam, became a popular success in mainstream cinemas. Yet the crew endured hideous disasters during production. Most famously, a large potion of the film, including the wedding itself, was erased by an airport X-ray machine. Happily, the insurers paid up.
"Oh my gosh. There was an example where every challenge became an opportunity," she says. "When we went back and did the re-shoots I got them to pay for more rain and, actually, that helped it look less like an indie film. It ended up looking better than it had."
Really? She might find herself tempted to lose footage more often. "Stop. You will give me ideas."
In recent years, Mira Nair has developed an enviable international lifestyle. Married to Prof Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born lecturer at New York's Columbia University, she has homes in Kampala, Manhattan and New Delhi. She dedicates much of her free time to an educational project in east Africa aimed at enabling indigenous film-makers to blossom.
"The ambition of the scheme is to create truly local cinema that tells stories about Africa," she says. "People in Africa have a great tradition of telling stories, but they have no chance to illustrate those stories through images. Films about Africa always deal with this faceless, nameless continent. Look. If we don't tell our own stories, then nobody else will."
Nair has come a long way since her time being patronised by contemporaries at Harvard. Indeed, the success of both Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding may have helped erase some of those western misconceptions about her own country. The Namesake will, perhaps, dismantle further stereotypes concerning Asian immigrants to the United States.
"Eight years ago I was honoured by Harvard," she says. "I was invited to an Asian society there and thought there would be, maybe, 50 people or whatever. There were, in fact, 1,500 south Asian undergraduates in that year at Harvard. They were mostly American-born. All children of immigrants, like Gogol in The Namesake. I thought, soon this country will be run by people who look like us.
"What this movie gave me was a contact with the south Asian cool of Manhattan and elsewhere. That is a whole different world to 20 years ago."
So, did she feel markedly uncool back then? "Oh no. I didn't. I was very cool. It was the rest of them that weren't cool. Those people who had no idea about our culture weren't cool." Quite right, too.
The Namesake is on release