Interview by Ethirajan Anbarasan and Amy Otchet
Mira Nair
I can only make films
about subjects that get under my skin and make my heart beat faster
Mississippi Masala:
an indian family migrates
to the United States.
The censorship problems aside, I do believe that
women film-makers have access to some people and subjects which men do not
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The 'tough sister' Mira Nair took the film world by storm with her first feature,
Salaam Bombay!, in 1988. Coming from a country which produces more feature films
than any other, she proved that even art movies can be commercially successful. Her
film career, which started in 1979, has brought her global accolades and at the same
time fierce criticism at home. |
Salaam Bombay!:
Mira Nair's first feature film.
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Filmography Nair's key productions: My Own Country (1998): The story of an Ethiopian-born
Indian doctor treating Aids and HIV patients in eastern Tennessee in the mid-1980s
comes to realize that the epidemic is a spiritual as well as a medical emergency. Documentaries include: Children of a Desired Sex (1987): explores
the conflicts facing pregnant women who decide to undergo abortions after learning
that they bear female foetuses. |
You were born in India, studied in the United States and now live in South Africa. Where is home?
I left India when I was eighteen years old and then divided my time between the United States and India for about ten years before meeting my husband in Kampala, Uganda, during the shooting of Mississippi Masala. Now we have been living in South Africa for the last two years. I travel a lot due to professional reasons but I make my home where the family is, where my husband and child are.
Why did you decide to go into cinema? Your films seem fired by a strong sense of social justice.
I was not one of those people who knew they would be making films from the age of eight. I fell into cinema, and then became possessed by it. I started as an actor, committed to fairly radical experimental theatre, street protest theatre and related things. I was also a good student, and suffered under the illusion I might have become an academic. I received a full scholarship to study at Harvard University when I was eighteen and went to pursue my interest in theatre. But once there, I felt the theatre at the university was too conventional, too staid, compared to what I had done in India. I also grew impatient with the lack of control one has an actor. Actors are always at the mercy of directors and their vision of the world. I wanted to be the one in control - telling the story, controling the light, the gesture and the frame. Creative freedom is imperative for me.
Making independent films is an obsessive task - having an idea, writing the script, finding finance, casting, shooting and editing. Then comes the big struggle to make sure the film is distributed throughout the world. All of this could easily take one or two years. In order to live with a project every day for two years I have to be obsessed by it. I can only make films about subjects that get under my skin and make my heart beat faster. I am not in the business of producing films which offer a pleasant way of filling a Sunday afternoon. That is for others to do, and I don't dismiss it. But I am attracted to ideas that will provoke people and make them look at the world a little differently - stories that come from my part of the world.
I do have a private agenda, I suppose, to resist the cultural imperialism of Hollywood by putting people like ourselves on screen. It is an enormous validation to see people on screen who look like us in India or elsewhere in the South. We must tell our own stories, because nobody else is going to do it for us. I must say I enjoy the responsibility of exploring and portraying these stories through film-making. After all, film, unlike academia, reaches millions. This is another dimension of my work which I really enjoy - the ability to reach so many people. Yet at the same time, I don't forget or underestimate the individual viewer in the audience.
Why focus on communities and individuals living in exile and what have you learned about cultural identity and racism? Why do Indian communities in exile, for example, feel the need to keep to the fringes of society?
I seem to be getting some sort of reputation for making films about exile. I didn't choose this, it chose m e. Distance from a community is something which used to confuse me but now I use it as a tool for my films.
I suppose I understand that state of being, and know what it feels like to look outside a motel window in Mississippi and see my garden in Kampala. You can find yourself on the other side of the world and yet still find a reminder or link to home. Yet I don't suffer from nostalgia or homesickness. I think of myself as someone with a huge appetite for the world and as a great lover of people. I find this great commonality between people. Yet ignorance and fear - the two hallmarks of racism - blind us to it.
What was especially moving about being in Mississippi to shoot my film was that I found black families - with their closeness and church and singing and barbecues - were actually so much like the Indian families that seemed so removed from that community even though they lived just across the highway. The Indian community was doing the same things, believing in similar values to those of the black community. Yet the Indians imagined the blacks to be not quite as human or the same as them.
Indian communities living abroad form their own circle, perhaps to maintain a certain cultural and sometimes religious purity. In the process, they become more frozen in their "Indianness" than those living in India. By doing so, they also systematically exclude themselves from integration with the local communities. When I went to Kampala to make Mississippi Masala, some Indians were surprised to see that I am not as "Indian" as they expected.
Your films explore paradoxes by showing how, for example, the slave becomes the master. Where does this insight come from? Do you draw on your observation skills as a documentary film-maker or on your intuition?
I have an eye and ear for paradox. That is life. The grey area where no one person is less or more virtuous than the other. For me the truth is far more interesting, far more strange, than fiction.
This is where cultural specificity comes in. You do extensive research about a theme, feel it and then create a story that could become universal. Tyranny is the absence of complexity, as Gide said. And complexity is interesting to explore in film instead of constantly looking for the lowest common denominator. I believe in intuition. I follow my intuition absolutely in finding and developing stories to tell. For me, there are subjects which just seem obvious to explore. For example, I once made a documentary called Children of Desired Sex, an Indian euphemism for people wanting only male children, the desired sex. The documentary set out to explore how amniocentesis, the procedure invented to test the genetic balance of a child, was being abused in a horrific manner in India as a test for women to ascertain the sex of their unborn child. If the foetus was female, they would abort.
But finding a subject is not enough. The trick is to create a work situation in which intuition is allowed to reign.
Many people who spend years abroad benefit from a certain distance when returning to their countries of origin.
They are able to critically observe their native societies, without necessarily passing judgment. Perhaps this distance helps to explain the clarity in films like Salaam Bombay! Yet it may also bring you opposition. How do you respond to accusations that you are trying to sell India's poverty?
I choose subjects which touch me. I am not the first one to be accused of selling India's poverty. The government accused even the renowned film-maker Satyajit Ray of the same thing. After seeing Salaam Bombay! I don't think anybody can say that it is a film that gratuitously shows the depression and misery in India. The movie celebrates the survival of the human being in the face of all the odds. In day to day life, an individual does not notice such things. Also, many of us in our lives - instead of coping with the inequities of existence here - become blind and numb. Yet looking away from reality does not make it disappear.
The same thing happened with Kama Sutra. I didn't hide sexuality behind veils or dances. Indian commercial films are always filled with sexual innuendoes and obscene songs about "what is under the blouse". In fact, sexuality in Indian cinema is cloaked in rape and violence. In my film, I wasn't trying to shock but tell the story straight, without hiding behind illusions or pretence. The irony is that we come from a culture which had regarded love and sexuality as a link to the divine. It was an art to be learned and yet to be treated as a matter of fact.
Do you think Kama Sutra generatedeven more controversy because it was made by a woman? What possibilities or pitfalls face a female film-maker?
Films portraying sexual subjects are bound to attract problems with the censors. But you cannot imagine the troubles that lie in wait if a woman director attempts to focus on them. Before making the film, everyone told me that I would have problems but I never imagined that I would be dragged through the courts for almost two years! After going through all kinds of legal battles with the Indian censorship board and government, I knew that the attacks were particularly vehement because I am a woman.
The censorship problems aside, I do believe that women film-makers have access to some people and subjects which men do not. For example while making my film India Cabaret which dealt with the lives of female stripteasers in Bombay, I could enter their lives in a rather comprehensive way. I even managed to visit the houses of the men who frequented these cabaret joints and talk to their wives.
Kama Sutra felt like an experiment. Was it an attempt to shift from being a documentary film-maker to being an art film-maker?
While I was working in documentary I often became impatient when I had to wait for something to happen and then not having it happen like I hoped it would. I wanted to have a lot more control over gesture and drama. So I shifted to feature films. The challenge in a feature film is to capture the sense of the instantaneous moment of a documentary. Documentaries have a certain edge as events seem to unroll before the camera. This is difficult to convey in the controlled environment of a feature film.
My greatest challenge in Kama Sutra was to be faithful to myself and to make a film about strong women who are not afraid to celebrate their sexuality and have found a way to love fully. Another challenge was to create a world that felt real. Not to create one mired in exotica and anthropology, but one that felt so local that it became universal. I wanted to address the lack of understanding or thought about what is genuinely Eros and how we should be prepared to handle Love. I think I succeeded in showing how Eros permeates everyday life.
The film is not targeted at any particular audience. It's for the world. Perhaps this ambitious goal proved to be a problem for me, but it was a good lesson. Although I achieved what I wanted to in the visual and sensual qualities of Kama Sutra, I felt that the story suffered.
Film-making is a journey, like any other work of art. You make films and hope that the end product is what you wanted. Sometimes you achieve that and sometimes you end up with something different.
How did Indian women viewers respond to Kama Sutra?
When the movie was released in India last year I made contractual obligations with the distributors that there should be matinee screenings thrice a week for women only. In Indian cinemas, 90 per cent of the audience are men. I did not want my female audience to be harassed or intimidated by men's presence, so I insisted on these all-women screenings. It made women feel safer and made it easier to see my message.
It is a myth that Indian women do not want to know about intimate love. In fact, the film was a great hit and women frequented the theatres all over the country. It was among the top three commercially successful movies in India last year.
How do you find finance in a developing country where there is hardly any support for art movies?
I am lucky that my films actually make money for those who invest in them. For me the most important thing is to have complete independence while making a movie. Yet it is very difficult to find finance for my kind of work in India. That's why I rely on a mix of international distributors, mostly from Japan, Europe and some in India. I don't take the whole sum from one person or company because that would involve a lot of constraints and dependence. I would have to make a movie according to the needs and interests of the financier instead of making a film that is mine. I think you have much more freedom with $6 million raised independently than $50 million from a single studio.
Do you consider film-making to be a cultural industry or an art form justifying and requiring state support?
As an art form, films do need support. For example, it would not have been possible for me to make my first feature film without support from India's National Film Development Corporation. We get to see lots of good movies from Australia where the state supports the industry. Ideally speaking, a movie should be able to support itself, but I still believe in some form of assistance or subsidies, especially for first films.
India produces the largest number of commercial films in the world, with its own version of Hollywood referred to as Bollywood (Bombay). Yet the country fails to produce good art film directors. Why?
I wouldn't say that Indian directors lack talent. It is simply that they lack opportunities. Basically you have to struggle for yourself to find finance for your movies in India. Unless the financier is sure about making profits, he will not support the project. Second, there is a big problem in distributing films. I know many cases where movies are made but never seen because there aren't any distributors for art films. It's not that Indian audiences aren't interested in seeing independent films. The problem lies in the lack of theatres committed to showing them.
What next?
I am now working on a movie called Bombay 2000, which I suppose I could call my first Bollywood film, but on my own terms. It's about a city going global, about the relationship between a mother and daughter and an American hustler who enters their lives. The mother was a legendary film actress in the old Bollywood and now dubs Baywatch [an American television series] into Hindi. And her daughter is a starlet in current super-slick Bollywood films.
The UNESCO Courier