A Conversation with Filmmaker Mira Nair


	The Proper Introduction	4:33
	The Fuel of My First Excitement	6:36
	The Extraordinariness of Everyday Life	16:08
	How to Make Something Out of Nothing	8:50
	I Learned How to Be a Horsetrader	7:22
	If We Don't Tell Our Own Stories, Nobody Else Will	5:51
	Audience Question & Answer: Part One	12:04
	Audience Question & Answer: Part Two	8:47

	I Learned How to Be a Horsetrader
	For Mira Nair, "the game" with Hollywood began after the critical and commercial success of <i>Salaam Bombay!</i>. The studios started calling, asking her to direct "any kind of films with children…of any hue" but she wasn't interested; the idea for her next narrative feature film, <i>Mississippi Masala</i>, which explores racial tensions among minorities in the South, interested her instead. When she pitched the idea to one studio executive, he "baldly" suggested, "Have you ever thought of having a white protagonist?… You know, it would make your life much easier." Nair answered, "All the waiters in this film will be white." As she remembers now, "He laughed; I laughed; everybody laughed; and of course, I was shown the door." Such "rejection" she says, "really suits me…. It's like a kick in the heart…. I just get more energy…. That's what it is to be an independent filmmaker…. You have to get used to it."<br> <br> <i>Mississippi Masala</i>, which stars Denzel Washington as the owner of a carpet-cleaning business who develops a relationship with the daughter, played by Sarita Choudhury, of one of his Indian clients, was Nair's first "quasi-Hollywood" film; <i>The Perez Family</i> was her first "full-blown Hollywood feature," and it "was not a very pleasant experience." Although Nair "loved the story of memory and exile" and has always felt "inspired" by Cuban culture, she disliked the studio politics that surrounded <i>The Perez Family</i> in post-production. "They tested the film and it got really high marks and they began to feel it was an out-and-out comedy." Nair, meanwhile, believed that, while humorous, "the whole conception" of the film was different from the comedic. She and studio executives "fought for four months in the editing room." From this experience, Nair tells John Lithgow, "I learned how to be a horsetrader."<br> <br> In 2003, Nair directed an adaptation of William Thackeray's classic novel <i>Vanity Fair</i>, a "banquet of a piece" she has "absolutely loved" since first reading it at her Irish-Catholic boarding school in India. Nair says her <i>Vanity Fair</i> is "an epic film with Waterloo and battles and balls," featuring a Hollywood cast led by Reese Witherspoon. Still, she insists, this story of "a multi-layered, complicated world" will not be "a star vehicle." Instead the film revolves around what Nair calls a "spiritual" question: "What do we want in life; what is our vanity; and once we achieve it, are we content?"<br> <br> <br> <br>