Mira Nair Q&A

The director discusses The Beatles, stoner comedies and new film 'The Namesake' with Ben Walters.

Mar 27 2007

Based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, 'The Namesake' is the latest feature from director Mira Nair ('Salaam Bombay!', 'Mississippi Masala', 'Monsoon Wedding', 'Vanity Fair'). Nair grew up in India, including Calcutta, before moving to America as a student – much like the story's Ashoke, who arrives in New York with his new wife, Ashima, as a young man. Played by Bollywood stalwarts Irfan Khan and Tabu, the couple only gradually acclimatise to life in the US, while their American-born son, Gogol (Kal Penn of 'Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies'), is thoroughly assimilated.

How did you come to be involved with 'The Namesake'?

I was committed making two other films – they were already financed and everything – when I read 'The Namesake' by chance on a plane. At first it was really being inspired by grief: I was in mourning for a parent I had lost – my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me – and burying her in the snow of New York when she was an African woman [Nair's husband is from Uganda] was so shocking and so devastating, and also the first time in my life to be confronted with the finality of loss. I felt Jhumpa really distilled this and like I had found a sister or someone who understood exactly what I was going through.

But then as I got more involved with it, it was obviously not your classic reductive immigrant story of the mail-order bride who comes from the dirt poor to the shiny sparkling new world. None of those stories do justice to the complexities of our lives, of our parents and us and so on. And I have to get visually engaged or inspired and both these cities, New York and Calcutta, I know so well, and I have lived in that state between them for so long. What I love in filmmaking in general is the circus of life and that subject matter just gave me so much, so many places to go.

Ashoke and Ashima's relationship offers a very positive picture of an arranged marriage.

I'm very interested in a love story of that generation, that etiquette, that courtesy that doesn't need roses and diamonds and Hallmark cards and 'I love you's. I really wanted to capture that sense of stillness that our parents' generation have, where you sit in the kitchen and drink your cup of tea and it's just that – you're not multitasking and you're not thinking of a hundred things. Even the erotic fascination of what happens behind the doors of people who are still, and strangers to each other at the beginning – how do you fall in love, if you do, and what is it like? It was wonderful to try and do justice to austerity because austerity is a way of being but the emotion and the heart and the turbulence of feeling is still the domain of all.

You've mentioned that you live between different countries yourself. Is that kind of constant transition stressful?

No, it was not stressful, it was actually like a key [to the film], it was like a way in and a visual grasping of the emotional landscape, if I can sound pretentious. Because that is what it is like, to look out of your window and instead of the Hudson river you see the Ganges, that's the way it is when you live between places. I have in my own life declared nostalgia a fairly useless emotion, but it's nice to process it in film. I never wish I was somewhere else. I feel like all you have is this moment, and live as fully as you can because we forget, don't we? We live in the future and the past – we sit around worrying about what we can't control, and regretting what we can't control either. What's the point?!

The actors, like the characters, are from different backgrounds.

That was clear to me from the beginning, to cast Gogol in America and the parents in India. But putting them together, actors are actors – the way I work is I create a world in which we can all make fools of ourselves, frankly. To be mindfully foolish is a good thing, a necessary thing – to get out of the box, to not be in safety zones all the time. We take risks and we do it and so it was very much like the film, where Kal was like a kid. Kal broke my door down, he wrote to me saying I had to see him, he was an actor because of seeing 'Mississippi Massala' when he was eight years old in a New Jersey mall and seeing that kids who looked like him could be on screen, so that is of course a wonderful seduction for a director. But I really was urged to look at him by my then-13-year-old son and his best friend, who was 14, who demanded that I look at Kal Penn and every night going to sleep I swear, he would say 'Mama, in the morning, when I wake up, tell me it's Kal Penn.' He's a hero for young fellows, basically, but it's a genre that I don't get engaged with, the stoner comedies....

You're also working on a feature documentary about the Beatles in India at the moment.

I'm deep in the Beatles. The Beatles came to India in '68 when the whole world was crazy – in Paris, in Vietnam, the King and Kennedy assassinations – and they fled Beatlemania to go to Rishikesh. It is believed that they wrote 48 songs while they were there, most of the 'White Album' and some of 'Abbey Road'. I thought it would be really interesting to make this film an exploration of inspiration – how does inspiration strike? This moment of amazing inspiration that the Beatles had in this remote place on the banks of the Ganges – how does it happen? It's a series of interviews and an essay – I really want it to be an eternal film, not just 'down memory lane with the Beatles'.

'The Namesake' is out Friday March 30.

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