INT: My name is Kasi Lemmons, today is February 23rd, 2017. I'm conducting an interview with Mira Nair for the Directors Guild of America's Visual History Program. We're at the DGA, New York.

MN: My name is Mira Nair, my name at birth was Mira Nair, and my nickname was Pagli, which is Hindi for "crazy girl," or, "mad girl," which I still am. I was born on October 15th, 1957, and I was born in Rourkela, Orissa, East India.

INT: Hi. [MN: Okay. Hello Kasi.] I want to talk about your early life and your ambitions and your mentors. Did you have mentors that influence you? 

MN: Well, I grew up in a very small town in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, which is the new capital that my father was one of the early civil servants after India became independent, he... the British civil service was replaced by an Indian Civil Service, and my father was one of the first years of that. And we were always posted, or he was posted to regions of India that are very far from one's birthplace. So even though my family is from the North, we are Punjabi, which is kind of the party animals of India: The farmers, the peasants, the industrious folk. He was posted way in the East in Orissa, which was this new state. But with ancient temples, like 2000 temples in my hometown, you know? Many of them with tall grass around them and many of them alive. But it was like a place that roads were being made when we were living there, you know? So it was early years of an ancient place. Pretty enchanting. I have two older brothers, and I was the tomboy as a result. And we would spend, you know, languid afternoons playing cricket in the unkempt gardens, and you know, distinct feeling of the seasons, because it was so hot that when the rain came and the monsoon, the asphalt would rise from the, you know, new roads outside our home. It was... you know, and then the first airport came when I was about eight years old, and we would just cycle to the airfield, like you see in the movies, you know, just to see this bird come down. So it was pretty simple, but at the same time through books and through education really, the world somehow was still with us. You know, we spoke the lyrics of The Beatles, we protested for the Vietnam War when I was like 12 years old, you know. We were much more aware of the world than the world was aware of us. Yeah.

INT: Do you remember the first movie that made an impression on you or…? 

MN: You know, we--this town had hardly a movie theater. It had one movie theater when I was in my teens, and it was called Ravi Cinema, and they played DOCTOR ZHIVAGO pretty much every Sunday. And otherwise there was Bollywood kind of movies, which we never saw. So movies were not part of my childhood. The first movie I remember I went to see was called HATARI! of all things, the John Wayne movie in Calcutta, which is the big city a day away. And my, you know, and it was strangely a John Wayne movie where he's in Africa, you know? Anyway, that I... but it didn't make any kind of impression except that it was very exciting. So I didn't grow up with movies as much as I grew up in the theater, with the theater. I was... I went to an Irish Catholic convent school in the mountains, in the Himalayas, in Shimla. And there I always was cast as the man in the theater. So I was... because of my deeper voice and I was the baritone and I was always Daddy Long Legs or the captain in “H.M.S. Pinafore”. But theater was something I was steeped in and transported by. Shakespeare, there was a troupe like Merchant-Ivory film, SHAKESPEARE WALLAH; there was a troupe that came through our schools performing Shakespeare and that was the first thing that enraptured me. But also, you know, in India, in rural parts of India where I grew up in Bhubaneshwar, we had this amazing form of traditional mythological theater called Jatra, which is the traveling theater. And they would come into school fields with no props and with a lot of hashish and men and women and mostly... and children too. And with acrobatic and declamatory voices, they would, you know, perform the myths of our holy books. And it was incredible. No one went--I used to steal off with my driver and sit there, you know? But because it was really just for the countryfolk, you know. But those were experiences that shaped me, you know, that wanted me, that made me like want to tell a story, or want to be transported, that was exciting, to be taken out of your mind, you know? But with something that you can recognize as a story that is for you. I think, you know, that probably would be an early inspiration.

INT: And you were an Actor? 

MN: Yes, and I was an Actor without knowing kind of, but I did that. I mean that's what I did full-time. When I finished high school I was actually a ridiculously good student, and so I got a scholarship to go to England, to Cambridge. And I turned it down because I was a, I used to always tell my mother that if I was born in the Raj, if I was born while the English ruled us, I would definitely have killed somebody, you know? I would be an anarchist. So anyway, so but having rejected Cambridge, I went to Delhi University [University of Delhi], and there I became part of a theater company, pretty much full-time, called Theatre Action Group. [INT: That's amazing.]

INT: And so how did you get to Harvard? What made you want to go to Harvard? 

MN: Well, you know, I went to Delhi University and then I, you know, thought I could be an academic, and I was not challenged by the academics. And I saw LOVE STORY, this Ryan O'Neal, Ali MacGraw cavorting about in Odeon Theater in Delhi. And really I thought that place looks like it has money for people like myself, you know, like maybe I could apply for a scholarship. People in India went abroad when they were in post-graduate, but not as an 18 year old. So I just, you know, went to the American school by chance, went to look at catalogs. Chose like Ivy League kind of rich places, so that--because I needed a full scholarship. And I applied. And without anyone knowing, even my parents didn't know. And then I would wait in the veranda for the postman six months later saying, "Oh my god, if it's a big packet, it means I'm in. And if it's a tiny little thing, I know it's nothing." Anyway, the only place that gave me a full scholarship was Harvard. And they even paid for my ticket to come. And I never had left India. And I was 18 years old and I came on a plane to Cambridge, Mass. and saw snow for the first time, and was very, you know, very energized to be there. But not particularly deeply culture shocked, because as I said, we knew more about the West than the West knew about us. But I was culture shocked in other ways, in the mores of the people, in the etiquette, in the lack of etiquette, in the ignorance about my part of the world. Wow, that was shocking.

INT: What did you study [at Harvard University]? 

MN: I finally studied visual and environmental studies, which is basically filmmaking. I majored in film eventually, but I... you know you have to take... I studied a lot of sociology, English, poetry with Robert Lowell. Really we had an amazing education. But once I found film, which I discovered through a course I took in MIT with Ricky Leacock [Richard Leacock] on cinéma vérité, once I discovered that, which I was about 19, then I, you know, sort of had this feeling this was for me, and I decided to major in it. And so you make group films together and then you make a thesis film. So that's how I started. But also it was in reaction to the fact that there was no interesting theater going on at Harvard, you know? So I would go to New York, to La MaMa [La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club], and work there in the summers, and that's where I would get my sort of fix with Liz Swados [Elizabeth Swados] doing the “Runaways”, or Andrei Șerban and the “Greek Trilogy” [“Fragments of a Greek Trilogy”]. I mean Ellen Stewart of La MaMa was an amazing woman, who just opened the doors and let me be there as a nobody, you know. So I used to get my fill of the theater, but I would have to go back to school and study something, and that became film. [INT: What did you learn from Leacock? Anything specific?] I learned from Ricky Leacock and his style and his person, that there's a story in everything. That it's a question of how you vibe with the situation and in that moment, to find that story or to tell that story. You know, that revelation that the ordinary can be extraordinary. That's what his whole style of filmmaking and Pennebaker's [D. A. Pennebaker] style was about and they were showing it, you know.

INT: So before directing narrative features, right? [MN: Yeah.] Before directing, you directed four documentaries. Including your master's thesis, which was what? JAMA MASJID... [MN: MASJID STREET JOURNAL, yeah.] So what did you learn from working on these projects that helped you transition to fiction filmmaking? 

MN: Well, at Harvard I had to make--I was majoring in film and my thesis became this film, 18 minute film that I had to shoot and do everything for myself, called JAMA MASJID STREET JOURNAL, which was basically walking the streets of Jama Masjid, old Muslim community in Old Delhi, with instead of a veil in front of me, a camera in front of me. And the interaction and the capturing of the public and the private lives of people in this extremely rich and vibrant and prayer-filled kind of community, where they're chicken auctions next to a barber's, next to you know, daily prayers. So that was my first film. A big lesson I learned from this, making this film was it's the one time I didn't follow my instinct at the end of it, which is when I was shot this film and brought it back to college, and I was editing it. I had conceived of it as a sort of, actually a silent film. And in telling my American friends around me what was going on in this scene, they encouraged me to write a narration that would explain this film to the world. And it was not my initial idea. My initial idea was much more poetic and much more unexplaining, you know? And but I did write that narration. And when, that's why I kind of can't see that film anymore. Although it got a commercial release in Manhattan after I graduated, it played at the Film Forum, which just kind of blew me away. And but I still cringe about my first film. Anyhow, so that was the first film. And then I moved to New York City and you know, got a, tried to get a job. I was a waitress for some time, and I was a... I also then finally got a job as an Assistant Editor, syncing films on back bay [editing bay] and sound and picture. And I was, I had to work nights on 57th Street here, and I was a neighbor at night to the next editing room was Robert Duvall, having just made his first feature, ANGELO MY LOVE, which is about gypsies. And he was convinced I was a gypsy, and you know, we had this unique sort of nocturnal friendship at night. You know, I would be cutting, he'd be cutting, and you know, we'd have these gypsy chats. Anyway, then I had started writing proposals for my own documentary films, and made a series of documentaries based in New York, but always kind of involving India somehow: SO FAR FROM INDIA, about a subway newsstand worker in 116th Street and Manhattan and his wife whom he left behind in India, and how the camera became their intermediary.

INT: The strippers--[MN: Of course.]--in INDIA CABARET--[MN: Yeah.]--and their clients. [MN: Yes.] How did you get them to trust you? 

MN: So I came from this world of the un-manipulated cinéma vérité. You know, purist where you choose what you want to do, or you're following a character. And then you find a situation where that character or the person you're interested in will have you in their lives. So I had wanted to make a film about the line that divided good women from improper women in our society, in India. It is a very strong line, and usually that line has to do with sex and class. And so I wanted to do this from the point of view of a woman who's considered outside goodness, outside propriety. So instead of a prostitute, I decided to sort of look at the cabaret clubs all across India where women come and sort of strip clumsily to a song, and have you know, night after night, and are not necessarily sex workers, but who dance for a living like this. But they would certainly be considered, you know, loose women or women who are not good, you know. And to tell it from their point of view. So I found this cabaret house outside Bombay in Ghatkopar where, off a highway, where there was this nightclub. And they allowed me in. And at first it was through the owner who let me be there, you know, without a camera, just to be there. It takes about two, it took about two months, and then I would hang out with the dancers. And the dancers are amazingly body open, unfettered sort of, and interesting characters. But they have no reason to trust me at all, you know. So it took many weeks of just hanging out and having them like having me around. Literally. It was as kind of simple and as difficult as that. And it's interesting because you may take your clothes off in front of men in a dark nightclub, but in your green room, you, they, you know, used to, were so modest and always under a sheet putting on their bikinis and whatever. It was interesting, like two worlds. And many worlds in fact. So...

INT: Did you also have to ...you shot the men as well [in INDIA CABARET]?; I mean they had to trust you too, right? 

MN: Yeah, I mean, you know, I say that alcohol was my best friend on this movie, because the men who came to the club were often drunk or would get drunk as the evening went on. And after weeks of being there, I brought my cameras in, and it was also interesting because my Cinematographer was Mitch Epstein, you know, white boy from New York, and the sound recordist was Alex Griswold, a fellow student from Cambridge, also a tall white boy. And these two men, there was a joke the women, the strippers, Rekha and Rosy, would consider them eunuchs, because, just for fun, they would say, "Oh they are, you know, eunuchs, which means that they don't understand us and our language, so they won't judge us. So they can be here." You know what I'm saying? And but the Indian men outside, they were, you know, the guys who were their customers, you know. So anyway, alcohol fueled a lot of interaction because the men would then finally, like literally come up to my camera and you know, talk to me. And I befriended much like this, one regular client: Mr. Puja [Pujara] was his name. And I, over the weeks, got to know him. He would talk to me, I would talk to him on camera, you know? And then I convinced him to let me come home with him and live with him and his extended family in Bombay. And he let me. And only after a couple of weeks did I bring in my two Cinematographer and Sound Recordist, but otherwise I went alone. And I really befriended his wife, who was a wonderful woman. And who had all the respectability in the world, but did not--but dreamt of freedom. Because she was like quite happy in her way, but she had a structured environment to live in. And she would talk to me about her dreams, you know? That she had respectability but no liberation. And then you put that against Rekha who has--the dancer, who has all this and you know, is pretty much at home with herself. So you ask, "Who is the more free?" So this was the process, you know, when you make a cinéma vérité film of that nature, you don't know where the story is going to go. You don't know what will happen to reveal, but you have to be completely alert and aware and of course it was the days of 16mm, so we didn't shoot randomly, we shot really, you know, everything was expensive. So it was an interesting craft about how to tell, how to craft a story from real life.

MN: But I found myself, you know, creating a narrative in the editing room [referring to INDIA CABARET], and that's what taught me the first principles of feature filmmaking, was the editing process of a cinéma vérité documentary, shaping it, you know. That's what led me to create, want to make a feature film out of what I call the extraordinariness of ordinary life in SALAAM BOMBAY! because I didn't want to make a film that was, again, required a kind of hit and run technique of, okay, it’s a film on street kids in the streets of Bombay, you know, if I would make it as a documentary it would be this kind of, "I get whatever I can get." But I wanted more control by then of light and gesture and storytelling, and I especially wanted an audience. And those days in the ‘80s [1980s] when I made these documentaries, even though they got on television and they did things like that, but I didn't never knew who saw them. There was no inbuilt audience for them. My own family didn't see them. You know, people didn't see documentaries those days; they were hard to see. But now I wanted, therefore, to get that wider audience and that led me really to create SALAAM BOMBAY!, my first film, as a feature film. But using street kids from their real lives, the story coming from an amalgam from their real lives and our construction, but really trying to marry the electricity of cinéma vérité with the structure, perhaps, of fiction.

INT: Did you have the structure first and then kind of bring the narrative of the kids into it? Or did you... 

MN: In SALAAM BOMBAY!? [INT: Yeah.] Oh no, it was all structured altogether first. [INT: It was all--] SALAAM BOMBAY! was... Actually, I showed INDIA CABARET, the documentary, in Hyderabad [India], in this film festival. And it was a, it really opened my eyes because it was spoken in the language of the people, the patois of the people. You know, the Rekha and Rosy, the protagonists of INDIA CABARET were very lively in how they spoke. And this kind of street speech is never seen on film in India, the Bollywood dialogue which we're all raised on is much more heightened and artificial and of like a movie rather than like life. So to see that life slang was really reaching the people in this opening of the INDIA CABARET, I was inspired to go back to an early idea of mine to make a film on street kids. And to have the... because of the, even the language was proving to be popular, you know. So anyway, that was one thought that inspired after INDIA CABARET to make SALAAM BOMBAY! as a feature. But and then I asked my dearest friend, Sooni Taraporevala, who was at Harvard with me and she used to write these brilliant short stories, and she's from Bombay, I'm from Delhi, and I said, "Let's make the film on street kids instead." So we both went back to Bombay and befriended a gang of kids. And like worked, like the documentaries, for four months did whatever the kids did, from rag picking to going to movies with them to, you know, being waiters at weddings. All that. Just observe their lives from the inside. And then went off and created a screenplay that Sooni really wrote, and I was shepherding. And then we had a workshop with 130 street kids in a church in the middle downtown Bombay, of which I whittled it down to 24 kids in the first week, and then 24 kids and I and a group of us and this wonderful theater director, Barry John, who had, whose company I had been an actress with in Delhi some years before, came to run the workshop. And we had like a six-week workshop in which we improvised and which we danced and did yoga and debated about life as a street child, and all of this. And then finally brought the screenplay into this workshop in about the third week. And split kids into groups and started to have them play the scenes. And kept informing the script from that, and then I would get to know who could play what. And then we brought the cameras in, in the last week. And that... and we sort of created a film set, so that we'd see who could keep the pressure, you know? And that's how I cast it. So it was all cast from the streets with a few now legendary, but then beginning film Actors.

INT: I remember like when I first saw that film [SALAAM BOMBAY!] and the impression that it made on me and how gorgeous it was. [MN: Oh thank you.] It was such a beautiful film and very, very successful, right? 

MN: Yes, yes, I mean it was... it won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes and all the awards, it won 25 awards and went right [up] to the Oscars, and also was the first Indian film to be shown commercially, distributed commercially all over the world. Because Satyajit Ray, who was such a master of our cinema, and has been lauded has never yet really been seen in so many places. But with SALAAM BOMBAY! I remember I was for one year on the road, you know, opening the film from Finland to Tokyo to Milan to god knows, everywhere, you know. [INT: That's amazing.] It was a lot and exciting because we actually created an incredible street foundation called Salaam Baalak Trust, for street kids. Because SALAAM BOMBAY! changed government policy in India on street kids, and then we began these centers, much based like our workshop. We had three centers, and now we service about 5,000 street kids a year. And it's 27 years old this trust, and it has, this foundation called Salaam Baalak Trust, and it's really changed kids lives, which is great. Even greater. [INT: It gives me chills, it's amazing. It's such a... it's incredible. There's certain types of success that are just so meaningful. And obviously it was incredibly meaningful in your long career.] Yeah. Yeah.

INT: Okay, so then you... THE PEREZ FAMILY is your first studio film, right? [MN: Yes.] And then that also was your first director-for-hire kind of... [MN: Yes. I made... MISSISSIPPI MASALA was my second film. Yeah.] MISSISSIPPI, oh, did I skip that? [MN: Yeah.] I did, sorry, okay let's go back. [MN: Yeah. Which is, I'd you know--] Right, I remember that film very well too. [MN: Yeah, yeah. So yeah.] How did you get, I mean what attracted you to this story of an African American man and an Indian American woman? 

MN: Well, you know, after SALAAM BOMBAY! I, you know, got many offers of making every film on children of every hue. [INT: I can imagine.] And then had the good sense to avoid all that. And returned to an early idea of, which was born out of me being a Asian student in the middle, in an American university between brown and black and white. So what I call the hierarchy of color. As a Indian kid, at Harvard, you know, I was accessible to the black community in a very real way, and also to the white community, and but there were these interesting lines that were invisible but there between us. And I used to think about that and I wanted to make a film about what I call the hierarchy of color or saw as that. And it was just a fictional idea born out of reading about the Asian expulsion from, by Idi Amin in 1972 in Uganda, where I had never been. I'd never been to the continent of Africa, but I was struck by the fact that Indians who had never known India, who regarded Africa as their home, were one day banished after three generations of life there, by Idi Amin, for--to go back to wherever they might have come from. And how they came, actually, a lot of the exiles of Asian Ugandans came to Mississippi, came to the South, Deep South in America because it was generally dirt poor and you could buy your own businesses, which in this case happened to be motels. You know, and run a family business. And what... and there, of course it's the birthplace of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, the African American community that had never known Africa, from where they came, but were… You know, and so in my head, what if in this real universe of actually having hardly a motel owned in the South by someone who is not Indian, incredible. And usually Ugandan Indian. You know, what if love crossed this border? You know, of an African Asian falling in love with an African American, neither of them really knowing where each other have originally come from. But what if, you know? And also how as I researched, again, MISSISSIPPI MASALA with Sooni Taraporevala, the wonderful Writer, again, of SALAAM BOMBAY! who was with me, who we did the research, while we did that it was remarkable to me, the commonality between the African American communities in the South and the Indian communities within themselves, but never would that line be crossed except as employer, employee, you know. So these were the meditations at that time that led to making MISSISSIPPI MASALA.

INT: What happened to that wonderful Actress? She was so beautiful, did--[MN: Sarita Choudhury? She's very...] Oh, that was Sarita Choudhury? [MN: Yes.] Oh my god. [MN: Yes, yes.] I remember-- 

MN: Yes, I cast, you know, Denzel [Denzel Washington] right, and I think it's his second film. And just fell in love with this young, wild, unvain, intelligent woman I saw in London, Sarita Choudhury, and cast her opposite Denzel and they made a fantastically electric couple. Yeah, she's... Sarita has done great sort of experimental work, more now recently in HOMELAND and the Tom Hanks movie, A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING. And so she's been doing interesting work. Yeah. [INT: I remember that movie well, I remember the impression she made on me.] Yeah. [INT: And this scene of the two of them in bed together, you know?] Yes, yes, yes. [INT: It was so beautiful.]