INT: So I want to talk about your decision to adapt THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, which is a book I really loved. How did this strike a chord with you politically and personally? Why'd you decide to produce it independently? 

MN: Well, I am a child of India that was partitioned in 1947, into two countries of India and Pakistan. And of course these two countries, despite sharing an incredibly deep and same culture, language, clothing, look, are now divided through war and through really, I think, the act of the colonization that, you know, arbitrarily drew a line between people's, literally their homes. So my father came from what is now Pakistan, and came to India after partition. And my mother was on the other side, on India. So we both... they both, I mean, are in the Punjabi community. Anyhow, so we as children in India are never really allowed to go to Pakistan or vice-versa. It is very difficult. Yet I was brought up in India by my father and mother speaking Urdu, which is essentially the language of Pakistan. Knowing the music, the ghazal--everything. We were like Lahori children in India. But it was only in the year 2005 when I was invited to go to Pakistan, from here in fact, because my films were popular, and I was asked to speak, and my husband and I went. And it was like a complete embrace. It was like going home in the deepest way. Everyone looked like my family, sounded like my family, was indeed my family. There was--we're driving down a street in Lahore, and I said, "You know..." it was by a canal of water, and I said, "I learned to fly a kite in a very similar place," I said to my hosts. And they said, "Well, if you take the same road 30 miles down it is Amritsar. It is where you learned to fly a kite." It's the same canal. So, you know, it was very deep, and hospitable, and embracing and also infinitely refined and cultured. And I was desperately inspired…

MN: And I wanted to tell a story of contemporary Pakistan in a way the world does not know it, where Pakistan is equivalent to beheadings, and terror, and that's that. So I was alive to this possibility, and in that... a year passed when I was given the manuscript of Mohsin Hamid's book “Reluctant Fundamentalist”, which is the story of a brown man, you know, the coming-of-age story that we never read about a young man who comes from Lahore who goes to New York who becomes the king of Wall... prince of Wall Street and wants to be as American as, you know, blueberry pie. And then, you know, the planes fly into the towers, and 9/11 happens, and he is an outsider forever in this country that he's calling home. And what happens to that young man in a world that is global and interconnected, and finance is changing the society. And he and his work is the sort of, not even understood by the people he left behind in Pakistan and so on. And what was essential and amazing about it is that it was, in my thinking, not the usual monologue that we saw that America was having with the rest of the world, the stories of Iraq were always about American soldiers coming home with post-traumatic disorder and never about the bombs they dropped on the Iraqi women who lost everything. Or--you never heard that side of the story ever, ever, ever. They never even had a name. They never had a line of dialogue in all those movies that came out of the wars. So I wanted to tell that other story, as well as this one, because I also am privy to both worlds, like Mohsin himself. So we met, and anyway we really got along, and then we had to... the book is a monologue of this young Changez who's talking to an American who doesn't say a word, who is clearly someone connected with the CIA or is a journalist, somebody who has enquiries on his mind. But in the film we had to make that man a full-fledged character. And so that began a three-year odyssey of how to adapt essentially like a Camus monologue/book. And then, of course, how to finance it. And who will want the story told? And there were very few. I remember an English financier who heard this interconnected global story in which I had Liev Schreiber, and Kiefer Sutherland, and Kate Hudson, and Riz Ahmed, and, you know, Om Puri and Shabana [Shabana Azmi] as, I mean, like stars from the world, and a global story that required four countries shooting. And he says, he was getting drunk at lunch, and he had just won the Oscar for a movie. And he heard this global story, and he said, "What's the budget?" And at that time we had a budget around $15 million, which was still chicken feed compared to the scope of it. And he said, "Darling, you can shoot it in Rockaway Beach, but if you have a protagonist as a Muslim I'll give you $2 million," is what he said. And I really appreciated it, because it was truth. You know, he was telling the truth. And in our business we don't tell the truth much. I mean you just sort of faff about, but that was the truth. It was alcohol telling the truth. And it was exactly the notion of the time, which I was very alive to. That's why I never went to a studio for this movie, because it would have become a different movie by the end of it. So we tried to tell it, and we did tell it, eventually, independently. It was financed fully, by the end, from the Doha Film Institute who sought to have a dialogue about Islam and that notion of the world being told correctly or being told with some truth, you know. So anyway, we got the film made. And again it's a film that is made just like I wanted to make it, which is hard to say. [INT: That's amazing.] Because it's a political film that is highly prickly and very complicated, but… And I am not, I never expected it to, you know, be a blockbuster. I just wanted it to be made, because it was never being told, that story, and I'm happy that it exists. [INT: Yeah me too.]

INT: Talk a little bit about your collaboration with Michael Andrews who's the Composer. 

MN: So like I was saying, a film is about a, you know, making a film is often a choice about the world I want to inhabit. And with THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST this sort of Pakistani world, and very much a North Indian world, the same world I came from, the music of this world is, you know, incredibly rich in Sufi, Qawwalis, in live singing just normally, you know, in people's homes, in how you take a classical poem like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, one of our great poets of Pakistan, and put it to a kind of, almost a rap in the voice of the young, like Atif Aslam, this great pop singer in Pakistan. I mean the music in Pakistan and the talent is just beyond belief. And also, it is available and common. It is modern and everyday. So I wanted to do great justice to that sound. THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST starts with an eight-minute Qawwali, which is a duet of group singing by these extraordinary singer, Fareed Ayaz and so on, which whom I... they walked across the border from Karachi to India to be in this film. And, you know, anyway, so we did that. But the counter to that film, to counter to that sound is a more Western techno in the realm of “Thriller” to some extent, but not in that kind of... but in a realm of sound that is also of that world, which the world moves from an old Lahore to modern-day Wall Street to, you know, the industrialization of Malaysia, I mean, and to, of course, the call of prayer in Istanbul. I mean these are the sounds of THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, of Changez's world, as he runs around the country, around the world.

MN: So, I had been struck by the soundtrack of DONNIE DARKO, which is Michael Andrews' work. And I ended up using a lot of that DONNIE DARKO theme in my temp tracks of THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. And I always do this. I always ask myself, you know, "What happens? Why can't I approach this man? At worst it'll be a no, you know?" And I do. So I found Michael Andrews and called him, and he never had been, I think, East of New York. But I flew him out to Delhi where we were shooting most of THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, and he was such a, you know, a wonderful student of another culture. Great humility about him, but also a sense of mischief and confidence, you know. And he loved, you know, he just ate it up, what he was hearing, and then went back to California. And then, of course, the usual process of sending him the film, and talking to him and introducing him also to a whole series of Indian and Pakistani musicians in the West Coast to create this amalgamated soundtrack. And then I moved to Glendale, California and worked with him for several weeks. He's really inventive, and he's really, again, like handmade. He's a hands-on... there's nothing to do with machines and different big crews you know, like many big composers are. So we had a very beautiful and detailed collaboration in which his world expanded and mine did too. [INT: Amazing.]

INT: Ok. Let's talk about your most recent film. I'm excited to talk about this. QUEEN OF KATWE stars Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo, along with Madina Nalwanga. Discuss your casting and rehearsal process for the film and working with children and non-professionals to get the performance that you need. 

MN: Well, I've lived in Kampala [Uganda, Africa] now for 27 years, and we built a film school in Kampala called Maisha [Maisha Film Lab], now which is 13 years old, and surrounded myself with the notion that if we don't tell our own stories, no one else will. So therefore, you know, so many students have now come through our school. 700 to be precise. And 30 percent of, actually, the Crew of QUEEN OF KATWE was our students, who are now professionals. So I actually have always wanted to approach Ugandan society from within, and not just from within but with the love and irreverence that comes from calling it home. So when Tendo Nagenda from Disney came to offer me this amazing true story of Phiona [Phiona Mutesi], this girl who lived 15 minutes from my house, whom I did not know about, who became a chess prodigy from the worst slum, which was also 25 minutes away from my house, it intrigued me completely, because again, the story of, you know, the outsider who used her mettle to understand what is capable of being, you know, of what she's capable of, you know. And the story that I see every day there, which is that genius is truly everywhere, and you have to nourish it, and see it and then nourish it into being, like Robert Katende, this incredible coach, who taught Phiona how to play chess in this little church with used bottle caps, you know. So the story immediately captured me, and once I met Phiona and Robert, they're just real fantastic people and real people. Anyway, so I always conceived of Harriet, the mother of Phiona's role, for Lupita to play, because Lupita is an old family friend of ours and also was my intern for a year-and-a-half while I was making THE NAMESAKE, and I know her very well, and saw in her that same courage, and strength and formidability of the very young mother that Harriet was. And then Robert Katende is this uncanny resemblance to this Actor David Oyelowo, whom I have chased for--not chased, but like carried a torch for, for several years, because everything David does he disappears into, and he's so strong, and so powerful and African. Both of them are from the continent, which is a very different quality that I looked for, you know, because I am from, also now, from there, you know?

MN: But the children of QUEEN OF KATWE were always going to be children from Katwe, you know. And I have worked with this extraordinary woman, Dinaz Stafford, one of my close friends who cast SALAAM BOMBAY!, the street kids and has cast several films with me since then, who I asked to cast QUEEN OF KATWE, because, again, it's like my early films. It's like SALAAM. It's like MISSISSIPPI MASALA and all those films where the story, the casting, the locations, everything is borne out of actual research, almost documentary research. So we did the same thing here. We went to dance companies on the streets of these two slums of Chibuli and Kampala and Katwe. We went to schools, everything. I must have seen more than 700 kids for Phiona alone, and then found Phiona, Madina [Madina Nalwanga] who plays Phiona, in a dance troupe in a hotel on Sunday nights entertaining tourists. She was part of a traditional Ugandan dance troupe. And then we followed her back to her dance troupe, and 5 of our 17 kids in the movie came from that dance troupe, for instance, Sosolya Dance Academy [Sosolya Undugu Dance Academy]. And but it was Dinaz and my son Zohran [Zohran Kwame Mamdani], who was her assistant, who really found these communities of kids and put them through several workshops and all of that. And I would drop in on them; see who could be what. Same process as SALAAM BOMBAY! [INT: That's amazing.] So that's how, you know, it took about a two-and-a-half month process to cast all our children. But of course Phiona, the girl who plays Phiona, Madina Nalwanga, and her brother, that family of Brian… and those were the big, you know, big roles. And we put them through a lot of their paces, you know, because they had to learn how to face a camera, how to, the stillness of film acting, and yet I always wanted them to be themselves, you know, and to cast according to who they were, and to, again, make that the strength.

INT: I want to talk about soundtracks and this idea of it being an extension of reality and also how it impacts your decisions about score and sound design. 

MN: I think, you know, one of the great privileges and excitements for me in making film is how to use music and how to use sound actually. And often music can be a mosaic of found sound, rather than music as we understand it. For me, the beginning of every movie is often a piece of music, and we wrote the screenplay of SALAAM BOMBAY!, for instance, to this haunting violin, electrical violin, by L. Subramaniam, a great maestro of the electric violin in India, who'd never done a soundtrack, but we wrote the screenplay to “Raag Kirwani”, this music that I can sing for you right now, and that became unwittingly the sound. The kind of haunting melody of the street kid who comes to this magic city of Bombay to find his home, you know. And then I went to L. Subramaniam, you know, when we were shooting the movie, and I said, "I want to work with you." And he said, "I have never made a movie." And I literally kind of used about three tracks that he had already recorded, and I showed him how it could work, you know, and then moved in with him in Los Angeles for about a few weeks. And then we composed very, very much in a hands-on fashion, changing, and recreating, and simplifying and sometimes amplifying the music, but just using the idea of the violin being the only sound of SALAAM BOMBAY! And then the collaboration was excellent, and I asked L. Subramaniam to do MISSISSIPPI MASALA, which was, again, about how that sound that's created from the Africa of say West African and East African drum sound. You know, let's say... to Delta blues of Mississippi, you know. It was in fact already a bridge, and I wanted to make our soundtrack that bridge. So you'll see in that, in MISSISSIPPI MASALA, a real two worlds in music, but using, again, a sound of violin to create that bridge.

MN: With THE NAMESAKE I was inspired right from the beginning from this “Boatman's” song that Nitin Sawhney, a great British Asian music director, and composer, and really a rock star, had done in his album. And I loved it, and I used to keep listening to this album. And again “The Boatman's” song comes out of the Patiyali tradition, which is a tradition of boatman's songs, philosophical songs from this region of Bengal where THE NAMESAKE is from. So I went to Nitin Sawhney, and I said, "Let's work together." And I don't think he had done feature films ever. He had made his own music, and it was a nice and interesting shift to have him serve an image rather than just make music on its own. That was a little harder to do, because of this shift of his orientation, but it was... what an exquisite soundtrack we finished with. But it took weeks, but it was just right, you know, once he captured that melody, and then we embellished it, but it's really, amazing talent.

MN: And then I've worked several times with Mychael Danna with whom I worked with first on KAMA SUTRA [KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE]. I loved Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, and I wanted that kind of amalgam of sound in KAMA SUTRA which was utterly modern, but coming out of an old and ancient past, but in a most modern way. And Mychael Danna is from Toronto, is Canadian, but he has this t-shirt saying, "Punjabi by nature." He's almost an Indian in his soul, and he already was steeped in these references that I was giving him, and we made that beautiful soundtrack, again, very closely. It was his first American film. He had made only Canadian. Now he’s, of course, the Oscar winner FOR LIFE OF PI and etcetera. But I've worked on several films, including MONSOON WEDDING and several films, VANITY FAIR, with him. So I work closely with my, you know, Music Composers as a... but I also really am excited and very... it's a relationship that I love in making cinema is the relationship with my Composer… And I often bring a lot of music to the table, before the Composer even begins, because a lot of my films are based on found music, you know. So that music comes from my own experience whether it be an Indian '50s [1950s] pop song, Aaj Mausam Bada Beimaan Hai, the one in MONSOON WEDDING, or whether it be the Sufi qawwals in RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. Or I'll often like I go to, I went to Lahore for three weeks and recorded all these musicians that I love in songs that I want, like poems I've loved, and then I bring that rendition to my Composer, and then we, you know, embellish it and augment it here. So often I'm also alone in the creation of the music that forms my soundtracks. And then the Composer takes it, you know, and works on it. So music is a very hands-on process for me. And interestingly, I had to see SALAAM BOMBAY!, my first film, after some 21 years at the British Film Institute a few years ago, and I re-learned lessons from the soundtrack of that film that I had forgotten, which is that there is a great power in silence, you know. That the idea of music really working in your film is because of its relationship to silence, before or after, and one can fall into the trap of using too much music and then sort of washing the whole thing without its silence. And that's something that I have to re-learn from my own early work… But music is one of the great, you know, sort of pure joys of making film for me.

MN: In THE QUEEN OF KATWE I had an extraordinary collaboration also with Alex Heffes, you know, again to create that kind of orchestral counter to the African sound of the street, which was done by actually, my son was the Music Supervisor, Zohran Mamdani with Linda Cohen, of QUEEN OF KATWE, where they brought us like 29, 30 songs of great, you know, Ugandan pop and Nigerian pop, which is what the street in Kampala sounds like. But the contrast with the world of chess was an orchestral sound for me, and Alex made that sound in a very, again, multi-instrumental way, you know, both with Western classical orchestra mixed with African instrument. And so that contrast with the African pop of the street was what made QUEEN OF KATWE as alive as it was.

MN: So music is a huge dimension of how to do it, but often sometimes I think I could just produce music. You know, that could be enough for me to do. I love it, because I never forget a voice I love, and I've, I don't know, self-trained myself to sift music. And now of course I'm making a musical on Broadway of MONSOON WEDDING and working with a great music director, Vishal Bhardwaj from Bombay, who has written several hundreds of songs in his life and has done 21 new songs now over the last nine years we've cultivated this soundtrack. So music is a... Also, you know, coming from India we like are steeped in music, you know, almost too much of it, you know. But so there is that confidence of thinking of hyper-reality with music. But for me, the rigor of it, how to sift it, how to understand the extraordinary... I still don't understand. I still am ignorant on so much of it, but how do I feel the depth of our Indian classical music? And that is often the foundation of a lot of my soundtracks and also a lot of my films, because the pace, and the rhythm of, and the improvisational quality of a set foundation is how the Indian classical raag is based. And that is very much... it's like jazz, you know, in our, in the Western context, you know. And that is very much how I also make films. The foundation has to be strong, but you have to be freewheeling, and you have to go from it, you know, and come back to it with a kind of muscularity, but if you don't achieve that transporting ecstasy quality in creating any emotion in film or in any storytelling, you've got nothing.

INT: Have you ever changed a film after completing principal photography by using either voiceover narration, or shooting new scenes, or restructuring through the film editing? 

MN: Well, you know, somehow that idea of how to save a film usually is associated with the studio process. They always are looking for Band-Aids in which sometimes no one, it doesn't need to exist. So often I have subjected myself to the classical craft of how to tell the story better, you know, or clearer. I do believe that clarity is vital in storytelling, and if you create confusion, you create distraction, so I am very much a student of how to remove that confusion, but Band-Aids can hurt the movie as well as help the movie. Yes, I mean in AMELIA we tried forever, you know, writing voiceovers, and we never shot again. I rarely have that, I would call it a privilege you know, of shooting again, because I rarely come, I always cut my cloth to size, and I actually wouldn't regard it as a victory, to be able to shoot again. But in the case of MONSOON WEDDING, we lost four days of shooting to negative damage, and the insurance company had to fly us back to India to shoot those scenes again, so that, I made every challenge like that an opportunity. So looking at the rough cut, choosing to do that when the rough cut was done, ‘til you saw what the story needed, and then shooting that accordingly. We couldn't even afford rain in MONSOON WEDDING. We only could afford it once for the finale, and so when I lost these four scenes I put all four in the rain, because the insurance was paying. So that's the filmmakers craft, you know, is how to make every challenge an opportunity and how not to apologize for yourself, because god knows, you know, I refuse to do that. So yeah. So yeah, I mean, even QUEEN OF KATWE, which didn't need saving, because it had such an energy, and life, and heartbreak and wit in it, even that we just kept refining it, retooling it, re-maxing it, you know, right 'til the end. Right until we did, we then decided that the music was so cool that we had to have a music video for the end, and then we made this music video as a marketing device. And it was so fun that we decided to use it in the end credits, and, you know, one thing... That's the fun of it, you know, but you never stop. You know, you never say die, and you just keep refining it. And then comes a time when you, you know, do the publicity, and it's switched off. And I hardly ever actually go back and look at much, but it's fun being on airplanes and seeing people cry at the same moment or whatever.

INT: Over the years you've assembled a film family that you work with. For example, you've worked often with Lydia Dean Pilcher and Cinematographer Declan Quinn and Allyson Johnson, Editor. How do longstanding working relationships like this assist the filmmaker and the filmmaking process? 

MN: Well, you know, I count as one of the treasures of my life to have longstanding associations and relationships, both as friends and as creative collaborators, and even though I started as a full Producer and Director, because I didn't know any better, you know, with making my documentaries and SALAAM BOMBAY! It was only in MISSISSIPPI MASALA onwards that I was intro--I in fact hired Lydia Pilcher as a UPM on my film and then have worked with her as a Producer ever since, for 25 years, you know. And these are the real privileges, because it is such a collaborative act. It is so important and necessary to find a Producer who shares the vision of an artist as well as, you know, the pragmatics of how to make something happen on very little, which is kind of my ethos, you know. And then, you know, to know that you don't have to do it all, and you can't actually do it all, so Lydia has been the right and left arm of making so much work for me possible. Similarly, you know, Declan Quinn whom I can just go to, to take me further. Pretty much every artist that I work with, you know, is a way to take me further, because it is terrible I think to not be taken further, you know. And honestly if one doesn't learn a new something every day, it's pretty fossilizing, and I've never gone into that space where, "Oh yeah, I know this, and therefore I'll just do it with my eyes closed." For me it's not that at all, because, you know, as a person, as a full-fledged woman, mother, wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, daughter, all those roles that I, very much inform my work, and my art and my life. Every time one makes a film, you take energy away from something else, because making a film, as we all know, is the most obsessive act there is. And it comes with a lot of sacrifice of another world that you belong to, and I certainly belong to. And so I think very carefully about where I'm putting that energy. And now as I get older I really know that energy is not limitless. So for me to also have the privilege of creating a creative family within my film work, or any work, really, is a very comforting place. Not for comfort alone, but to be taken further and to be, you know, sharing not just the burden, but also the joy of it, you know. And it's amazing, you know. People are here, especially in this great city of New York, who have come, like me, from everywhere in the world, who are truly excellent and in this pursuit of excellence, you know. So that's the great privilege, as well, is to find those people and say, "Yeah, I want to be with you for a while," or whatever, you know? But it's also the way to make something happen, you know. And I'm lucky, you know, I work a lot. I mean work a lot for myself. And the way I can do it is because I have this amazing sort of team that I not just rely on, but who can propel me when I need that.

INT: In addition to--you can say you work a lot. I mean first of all I think you probably hold some sort of record for women filmmakers. I'm going to check on that, but you've made so many films. But in addition to the feature films, you've also made short films such as THE DAY THE MERCEDES BECAME A HAT and LAUGHING CLUB OF INDIA, documentary as well as narrative, throughout your career. You were saying you try to make one every year, right? 

MN: Yeah. I mean it's not a race, but I can sometimes make one or two short films in a year. [INT: That's amazing.] I just turned down something I would have loved to do, because I'm heading to the theater next month. But I love to do that. You know, some people love to make commercials and to hone their craft that way. I like to make short films, because it gives me the rigor of how to tell a story in a short amount of time, but also with total freedom. So you can make dangerous things or risky things, you know, in short films. I made a film called HOW CAN IT BE [8]? For a compilation feature of eight films that eight Directors made about the millennial goals, and had we achieved them? And I made, you know, a very tricky, risky film at that, you know, about a young woman who chooses to leave her husband to be the second wife of another man of, you know, and the, you know, the mistake perhaps of that or the moral ambiguity of that zone is an interesting film to go into. Anyway I make a lot of, yeah, short films. [INT: So incredibly prolific. I mean it's amazing.]

INT: Most of your shorts are part of an anthology series. [MN: Which one?] It's saying most of your shorts are part of a... 

MN: Yeah. I made one... one of nine Directors on the 9/11 one. It's a 9/11. Then there's a series called 8 in which I made this one film called HOW CAN IT BE? And then there's NEW YORK I LOVE YOU in which I made a segment with Irrfan Khan and Natalie Portman about the Diamond District, which is run by two orthodox communities. One the Hasidic Jews; the other the Jains from India, and what happens if orthodoxy falls for one second between these two communities? Very interesting, funny and beautiful film. So yeah, I like to... [INT: WORDS WITH GODS. What's WORDS WITH GODS?] Oh, WORDS WITH GOD is the last one I made, which was... my film was called GOD ROOM, and it was about, again, eight Directors coming together to talk on god. And mine was about Ganesh, the elephant god in Bombay. And anyway, I can tell you the story. It's a sort of, yeah, satirical film on where to put the god room in the house, you know, because it's true. You know, in many Indian homes we have a room for god, and in this particular dysfunctional family, god doesn't want to be there. God leaves the house.

INT: So when did you first join the DGA? Which project was it? 

MN: I believe I joined the DGA with HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS, which was in 2001, and I actually have loved being a part of a community of Directors that, you know, as Directors we hardly ever meet and discuss how we work, and the DGA has really committed itself not just to representing us in a very real sense, but also to providing a community. So one of my favorite events really in my year is having that Director’s dinner at the DGA and really meeting everyone who makes the New York community of Directors and feeling like you have a community. I've never had to ask the DGA for any serious arbitration yet on my part, but I know that I have them, and I know I am a part of that community to raise voices for others and, you know, maybe one day for myself.

INT: What do you think is the most important service that they [DGA] offer, and which area is the most meaningful? Which issues, like creative rights, residuals, diversity, etc.? 

MN: Well the idea, and the feeling, and the reality of having a real union and being a part of a union is an empowering feeling. And in cinema, especially now at the cusp, not so much the cusp anymore, of the digital technology that is going to come upon us and has already come upon us, the question of representation, the question of ownership, the question of rights, of course residuals, all that stuff, but really making sure that the creative rights are not frittered away by a new technology that could be in the hands of just the money and not the creators is a vital question, you know. Really that and also, you know, again, being a part of a community that upholds and wishes to foster inclusivity, you know. As a woman, being a part of a, you know, really I want to open the doors and demystify this process. You know, to have others like me feel like these doors are not closed to me, you know. It's very important. It could not be more important. So I feel like I have this cushion, you know, to rely on and also solidarity more than anything.

INT: Overall, what do you think are the differences between directing for documentaries versus television and feature films? Talk a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages of each, and are there factors unique to working in documentaries that make it more or less difficult to accomplish your vision? 

MN: I must say I hardly make documentaries anymore. The last documentary I made was THE LAUGHING CLUB OF INDIA, which was almost 17 years ago. I get nourished by documentaries. I am much more now, you know, into making fiction and features and now back in the theater. But what documentary has always taught me is the extraordinariness of ordinary life, is the unpredictability and the juxtapositions of tenderness, and brutality, and mischief, and tragedy and how to laugh at a hopeless situation as the way we do. Especially growing up in India, you know, the subjects, all my documentaries pretty much have been mostly about India. It's constant, this lesson I learned from the street, you know. That is coming, though, in the attitude of a cinéma-vérité documentary, a documentary that is not manipulated, not music-ed up, not like what we see a lot of documentaries now. With feature films what I, you know, each one is different, but it's about creating this whole holistic world, you know, with the electricity of what a documentary has given me, you know. But sometimes it's a very structured; it's a very stylized world. If you look at the world of KAMA SUTRA [KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE], for instance, it's a world that is marrying the kind of old aesthetics into a very modern way, a juxtaposition of nature with high regard of color, you know. It's many things, and, you know, THE NAMESAKE is this crystalline, almost entering a still photograph. MONSOON WEDDING is this kinetic, you know, handheld, freewheeling, fly-on-the-wall of my mad Punjabi family, you know. So each story, of course, calls for its own visual treatment, at least the way I look at it. And that's the privilege for me of not just being able to tell that story, but to tell that story in a feature film with all aspects of the medium at one's command, from music to the frame, you know.

INT: It's very clear talking to you, especially when you talk about putting together the music almost like putting together the visual references for the DP [Director of Photography], but there's a question that's kind of interesting: What does a Director bring to a story that takes it from the written page to the visual screen, and why do you think it's difficult to define the creative contribution of the Director? 

MN: You know, for me the Director's task is to have something very real and very particular to say about a world in which you have to carry a huge group of people to make them not just understand and inhabit that world with you and for you, but to take it further and to see where else we can go in this world. A Director's task is to make each one person on that pursuit, from an Actor to a carpenter, bloom. But a Director must bear the responsibility of folly, and mistakes, and must know the tricks to mitigate that, to again never apologize, but to, you know, also bring the audience in, in a way that shapes--for me it's very important. I am a shameless populist. I like people. You know, I like bums on seats, you know, watching my movies. I don't make films for, you know, a few people, and sometimes high-falutin' festivals have said, "Oh Mira, this is a brilliant film, but it's a crowd pleaser, and it's not for a film festival." And that's fine for me, you know. But still for me the art, and craft and magic, hopefully one day that you can achieve that magic in a film is the task of a Director. You know, not to call attention to herself or himself, but to bring you something that looks so deceptively easy, but may have taken a world to get to, you know. But the effort obviously must not show. That's what I love. And I also really listen to an audience, not to please them always, but to listen to the movie unfinished in an audience, because, you know, I am, I have an acute barometer for the restlessness that sometimes can take over. With MONSOON WEDDING I made it entirely for myself. No one was there, you know, telling me what to do, and I took it to Cannes, to the marketplace, because it hadn't finished before that, and we went to the market. We had to sell it. And, you know, we had the screening to cold-blooded commercial distributors, and I was nervous. I didn't know which way it would go, and at the end this party, we had, you know, every Dane, every Hungarian, every Icelandic, every person came up to me and said, "Well this is my family. These are my people. You know, I want to belong to..." whatever. They all bought it. But I was not happy, because in the screening I felt restlessness, my own restlessness. And no one asked me to do this, in fact it was a smash hit with the sales, but I wanted to cut out 15 minutes, and I found the money to cut out that, for that time for us to do that, and I cut 15 minutes. No one was part of that decision. And then we were invited to Venice. We had already been invited, but then I took the film to Venice, and my god, it just sped. It just sang on screen, and we won the Golden Lion, in fact, and all of that. But it was all my own feeling that I wasn't fully, you know… we have a nice Indian beautiful expression of "ras." Ras is like the essence. I wasn't feeling the essence fully all the time, and I wanted that, and I knew it was all there, you know. So I think shaping, and for me, rigor is a very important part of directing because sometimes it's not about showing all your wares. It's about showing a few, yeah.

INT: Who are the filmmakers you admire, and what do you think you've learned from them? 

MN: You know I have a very spotty film education. I never saw much cinema until I was 20 years old, and it always astonishes me that I saw The Apu Trilogy or Satyajit Ray's movies in Cambridge, Massachusetts when I was a student and not in India, because they were so hard to see there. But I definitely think the films of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, the films of later, the European films. You know, Emir Kusturica from once Yugoslavia is one of my favorite filmmakers because of his madcap, freewheeling rigor and the way, I mean, he evokes unbelievably visualist worlds with a daring that I adore. You know, Scorsese's, especially earliest work was a huge eye-opener for me. Michael Mann, I used to follow avidly, because I like the kind of visceral quality of his cinema, but the subject matter begins to interest me less and less. I love Jane Campion's work. I always look at it with a great appetite, because she always sort of follows her own heartbeat and does it with such a sensuality, and beauty and also bravery. You know, for me my nourishment also come from other forms of art. You know, photography specifically. I am a great student of, you know, everything from Katia Bresson to André Kertész to Atget [Eugene Atget] to, you know... the photography world is a big way for me to begin to interpret a frame. Music is sort of oxygen, and I follow that very avidly. But in the latter, in my last, you know, 15, 20 years I have become a gardener. I have become a person who works on the land, and I have also privilege enough to have a garden of a few acres in Kampala. And you know, working in landscape and the way I work, it's like permanent production design, is a major teacher for me and also a nourisher. So, you know, these... so my teachers are eclectic, you know, nature being one of the king teachers at the moment. Yoga being a prince [principal] teacher forever, because it allows me to have, it creates an equilibrium and an elasticity which is very, very important for my work.

INT: What advice would you give to young Directors? 

MN: What advice would I give to young filmmakers? I would ask them to first be students of living, to have something to say which you only can have if you're in engagement with the world. You can't suck it out of your thumb each time, and you certainly mustn't suck it out of other movies. You have to engage with life. I would ask to cultivate stamina, to keep practicing the craft, to not just go to work every now and then, because the craft is in every form of storytelling. You know, whether it's writing a letter, or it's making a screenplay or any of it. I have always, you know, sort of almost evoked a great capacity to accept rejection. That rejection gives me the spur to move on to other things. Hit me in the gut, and I'll show you that I can really do it, you know? You have to love rejection, because otherwise you'll never make it. It's too hard, and you've got to think that there's something sweet about it. And I used to, I used to, you know, sort of fling back my anger, and sometimes I'd never let them, of course, ever see that it could be more than anger, but that would have to fuel me and give me an energy, otherwise I cannot go to the next step, you know? And I would revel in the particular. You know, you and I, we are each distinctive and special people and human beings. We all are. I never want to become part of that cookie-cutting list. I want to make my distinctiveness my calling card, to not apologize for where I come from, but to say that in my coming from X place it is a place that you don't know. And this is the place I'll invite you in. And when I invite you in, you will recognize your place and you in it. That is also what a Director does, so...

INT: Thank you, Mira. This has been great talking to you. 

MN: Thank you. [INT: It's been so wonderful.] Thank you. [INT: I mean really, you give me chills. It's amazing to hear you talk.]

INT: My name is Kasi Lemmons. Today is February 23, 2017. I've concluded an interview with Mira Nair for the Directors Guild of America's Visual History Program, and we're at the DGA in New York.