In 1988, a young Indian director named Mira Nair shot to auteurdom when her first film, “Salaam Bombay,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Since then, she’s directed everything from the romantic comedy “Monsoon Wedding” to the 2004 film adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.”
On Friday, Fox Searchlight Pictures will release Nair’s “The Namesake,” a sweeping epic about an Indian family in America, based on the best-selling novel by Jhumpa Lahiri.
WWD: Was it daunting to take on this really popular, current novel?
Mira Nair: I wasn’t looking for a film. I opened the book six months after I bought it. I was on a plane to India in deep mourning for someone close to me who had just died unexpectedly, and I was experiencing for the first time what the finality of that loss is like. When I read the book, I was absolutely shocked by Jhumpa’s understanding of what it is like to bury a parent in a country that is not your home. And the book was a banquet linking Calcutta and New York, which are the same cities I’d grown up and lived in, and gone back and forth between. I’d always felt they’re spiritually similar and once I felt I would shoot the two cities like they were one; that was my key.
WWD: Yes. New York and Calcutta are both dark and gray in the movie. I certainly hope your own experience coming to America to go to Harvard in the Seventies wasn’t as bleak as Ashima’s [the story’s matriarch].
M.N.: No, it wasn’t, because I came with a scholarship to a very embracing institution. But I do remember, like Ashima, the deafening silence of the first snowfall. It took me three years to negotiate what I’d wear in the winter. I still cannot wear socks.
WWD: You grew up in India with a strict father who pressed you to read the classics. How did you wind up in the movies?
M.N.: I didn’t discover films until I was 20. My first fuel came from political theater. I worked as an actor on the street in Calcutta and then Delhi, then stumbled into filmmaking because the theater in America was not as politically engaged as I wanted it to be.
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WWD: In the West, we have an unwavering belief that a woman should be able to choose her husband, and that anything resembling an arranged marriage is not only anti-individualistic, but sexist. Yet in “Monsoon Wedding” and “The Namesake,” many of the couples who enter into arranged marriages seem quite happy.
M.N.: There is no one way of looking at the world. I personally am not a candidate for arranged marriage, but I have friends who have had very happy arranged marriages that have lasted more than 30 years. With this movie, I was enchanted by the idea of making a love story of two strangers who then fall in love, or learn to fall in love.
WWD: That’s an interesting way of putting it. Do you believe in love at first sight?
M.N.: I fell in love at first sight, really and truly, so I am blessed in that respect. But I still believe you have to learn to preserve love and to cherish it.
WWD: How do your parents, who are no longer together, fit into this. Was theirs an arranged marriage?
M.N.: Yes. It didn’t work. Me and my siblings begged them to separate.