Mira Nair interview

Indian director Mira Nair has just finished shooting Hysterical Blindness, starring Gena Rowlands and Uma Thurman as mother and daughter. We asked her to explain why her latest release Monsoon Wedding is not just another movie about a wedding.

The type of Indian films we call 'Bollywood' are becoming popular in the West now. Movies with a lot of strong emotion, color, song and dance....
Which is exactly the kind of spirit that Monsoon Wedding celebrates! But I wanted to make a portrait of modern contemporary India, of a time in India which is free of influence. The young people in India today are proud of their culture, they think it's cool to be Indian. When I grew up, we were always looking towards the West, we listened to the Beatles and such, you know.

What is a strenght about us Indians is that we have always opened our doors to the world. We have always taken in influences and assimilations, we have plagiarized things from the West, but in the end, we have made it something uniquely of our own.
That is what is going on now, and I was trying to give a picture of Indian life today, the negociations between old and new, in language, music, fashion.

Monsoon Wedding features very strong female characters. Has it been especially difficult for you as a woman to be a filmmaker?
It would have been much more difficult for me if I had tried to rise through the ranks, you know, started as an assistant and all that. But I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work.

It was extremely difficult of course, but not necessarily because I was a woman. It has to do with the nature of the game. Of course they are a lot fewer than men, but it's much less uncommon to be a female film director in India than in the West.

But it gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 per cent of the crew for Monsoon Wedding, and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego...And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of egolessness and that the film is bigger than all of us.

You made the whole film in just 30 days....
I made this film to inspire young people, because it was made out of nothing. The point of the film was to shoot it in 30 days, to do it very simply but imaginatively, to show young people that their story can be told using very simple means.

The thing is that films are associated with millions of dollars, special effects, and this kind of mystical other world. This film was designed to make something out of nothing, to make something of your everyday dining table. It was about testing myself, going back to basics, challenging myself.

The main character in the movie chooses to go through with a traditional arranged marriage. What is your view of this tradition?
My brothers, and a lot of people I know, have gotten married like that. Now they have a thing called a semi-arranged marriage, which is a term I regret I did not use in the movie, since it's hilarious! That means that the families introduce the boy and girl to each other, and then they have a courtship, they date for a couple of months. And then they choose to get married or not.

Marriage of attraction is a gamble anyway, so you might as well marry into a family that is similar to your own, and make that much less of an adjustment. But the 'love marriage', as it is called, is equally common in India now.

But it would be interesting to do a comparison of what would work better. Marriage is hard work, and it is a gamble

Your film Salaam Bombay has a very strong documentary style, and many of the street children in it are playing themselves. Are you moving away from the documentary style in your recent films?
Each film needs a different kind of treatment, in Kama Sutra of course there was no room for that kind of style, but Monsoon Wedding is all about that style! It's all about trying to create a documentary feeling. Scenes like the ones from the family dining table are completely constructed. But we would mix that with, for example, as soon as it rained, we ran out in the street to get images of Delhi, and that's documentary.

And the very fact that we used a hand-held camera is about that. I feel a great sense of freedom with the liberty of the hand-held camera, and the actors never knew where the camera would turn up.