Mira Nair's first film was Jama Masjid Street Journal, her Harvard thesis project, which explores the life of a traditional Muslim community from a Western perspective and was originally conceived as a silent film. After graduation, Nair moved to New York, where for six months she waitressed at night ("my parents said I didn't exist in New York, they were so ashamed"), so that she could pursue her film ideas during the day. Earning enough money to buy film stock, borrowing a 60 mm Bolex camera, and receiving a grant from the New York State Foundation for the Arts enabled Nair to begin her cinema verite film So Far From India, the story of an immigrant working in a Manhattan subway newsstand who returns to India to see the wife he left behind and to meet his newborn son. With her camera, Nair became like "a go-between," or "an ambassador," between her protagonist and his estranged wife. "This is what I mean when I talk about the extraordinariness of everyday life," she says.

Nair, who tells John Lithgow she has "never regarded documentary as a stepping-stone to fiction," spent the next seven years making "a series of documentaries" in India on "things that got under my skin, ideas that appealed to me." Her most acclaimed documentary, India Cabaret, was inspired by the question "What divides good women from improper women in our society"? Centering on the aging strippers of a seedy strip club in Bombay, with whom Nair lived while making the film, India Cabaret explores "the double standards of an essentially patriarchal society." The story of one of the club's regular customers and his wife also enables Nair to grapple with "the eternal triangle, Indian-style."

As much of a "struggle" as it was to make these movies, Nair feels her greater challenge was to find her audiences. For three weeks every year, she would "take all my films under my arm and get on a Greyhound and show them to anybody who wanted to see them." Despite the frustrations, Nair tells Lithgow she never thought she would give up. "I'm diseased. I'm permanently afflicted by cinema. I could not imagine life without making my work," she says.

Nair's "epiphany" came when India Cabaret was chosen to open the Indian International Festival and she witnessed the documentary's impact. "The language in the film is very wickedly funny...bawdy, mish-mash…very much how we speak," and unlike the usual "heightened, artificial" language of Indian "Bollywood" movies. When Nair saw how "swept away" people were by this language, she suggested to her friend Sooni Taraporevala that they co-write a fictional screenplay, using the same spoken style, about the lives of Bombay street kids.

Nair's "idea" for Salaam Bombay! was to "amalgamate" the "inexplicability of everyday life that we have in documentary" with "gesture, drama, and the controlled situation that we have in fiction." Although Nair shaped the film's narrative in the edit room with editor Barry Alexander Brown, she attributes much of the power of Salaam Bombay! to the twenty- four children who act in the movie. Following an "informal" acting workshop, Nair worked with these kids as she would with professionals, screen-testing them and paying them a day rate. "By the time we were out on the streets with 5,000 people watching…their focus was extraordinary." Their work, Nair reflects, contributed greatly to the "extraordinary experience" of making this film. For Salaam Bombay! Nair was awarded the Best New Director at the Cannes Film Festival. The film also was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.