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Transcript a Pinewood Dialogue with Mira Nair TRANSCRIPT A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH MIRA NAIR The immigrant’s sense of dislocation resonates in the films of Mira Nair, who often focuses on different permutations of the outsider—Bombay street urchins in Salaam Bombay! , Cuban immigrants in The Perez Family , a sixteenth-century Indian servant girl in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love —and their disconnection from the social order around them. Nair’s films often focus on complex female characters, and examine the complications that arise from the intermingling of ethnicities, traditions, and classes. In this talk, Nair discusses the examination of sociopolitical exclusion in her past work and in her adaptation of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair . A Pinewood Dialogue following a screening of re-reading it every few years. Every few years, it Vanity Fair , moderated by Chief Curator David gave me something different. But I never thought to Schwartz (August 29, 2004): make it a movie or anything. Two years ago exactly, Focus Features, who was distributing Monsoon SCHWARTZ : The director of Salaam Bombay! , Wedding , which was kind of running away with Mississippi Masala , Monsoon Wedding , Vanity Fair : itself, asked me to direct… Mira Nair. (Applause) Congratulations. And you’re the first guest to bring her own water, so that was… SCHWARTZ : It was a huge hit, international hit, big (Laughter) You didn’t have to do that, but we success, yeah. appreciate it. NAIR : Yeah, yeah, and they didn’t expect it, I don’t NAIR : Gandhi taught me a few things. (Laughter) think, to be that way. And they said, “What about doing our next biggest thing?” And it was Vanity SCHWARTZ : Whenever you hear that a filmmaker is Fair , without them realizing that I’d actually had this going to take on the challenge of directing a long history with it. So I said yes instantly. But they classic, eight- or nine-hundred-page novel, your had developed the script over ten years, various first, your honest response is: How can they do it? writers and so on. And the script was not what I Just tell about your—the history with this novel, loved about Vanity Fair , it was much more—almost Vanity Fair , and then your decision to direct this. the tale of Madonna. And I didn’t… (Laughter) It was just a star vehicle of the most, in a sense, NAIR : Well, we are all born with sort of colonial boldest sort. And I just loved the incredible tapestry hangovers in India, and steeped in English of humankind that Thackeray had woven, and had literature, whether we like it or not. And as it woven with such a clear eye, and with such a happened, one of the most influential teachers in political view, and with such a fine cross-section of my upbringing was Sister Joseph Catherine, an colony and empire, which certainly, Austen and all Irish Catholic nun who introduced me to of those then had no awareness of—or I shouldn’t Shakespeare and Blake and Keats and Shelley at say “no,” but I didn’t get it from any of them. It was the age of fifteen. And I read Vanity Fair , not on the really our world—but seen through an syllabus but kind of under the covers, when I was Englishman—or an Englishman who was born in sixteen years old. It’s the sort of novel…Well, first, I India. So it was quite interesting. loved Becky Sharp, and I always remember her, the character Becky Sharp, because she was a lot like SCHWARTZ : Right. And I think you described we were, you know? Girls who didn’t have it all on a Thackeray as the equivalent of a cinéma vérité platter, and had to make [their] own way. But then, filmmaker of his time. it was such a banquet of a novel that I used to keep NAIR : Well, because he wrote the cinéma vérité of NAIR : Depends which point of view. (Laughter) As his day in the novel. He wrote [The] Figaro President [Ferdinand] Marcos says, when he came [Triology], he wrote about the plays that were here and he was described as the president of the happening, he wrote about the food people loved. Far East, he said, “Far from where?” (Laughter) So I He wrote seven pages about the brocade vests that don’t know. “Outsider from where?” is the question. Jos Sedley had tailored near Bhajiwala, in Bengal, every time he chose to come back to England, to SCHWARTZ : Yeah. Well, you’ve been interested in show what a nabob he had become. He wrote people who try to fit into worlds. Salaam Bombay! , about all these things with great joy. He was a real which is about a boy in poverty in Bombay. He foodie and a real fashionista, Thackeray. (Laughter) survives by his wits on the streets. And in a way, He was. As I am. (Laughter) you seem to be interested in these people who go into a world and take an outside view and make it… SCHWARTZ : The character Becky Sharp, could you NAIR : I’m most inspired, really, by survivors of all talk a bit about how your approach to her is kinds. And especially survivors who don’t have time different than Thackeray’s? There’s a lot of to pity themselves or don’t have that inclination— ambiguity about her that’s really interesting. like Becky Sharp. I think that there’s a great lesson, and it gives me a spring to my step, and it sort of NAIR : Well, you know, Thackeray wrote this as a questions the whole basis of what—in this society, page-turner, he wrote it as a monthly tabloid; he especially—we think we need, you know? Because had to sell it by the chapter. And it was very survivors just survive, you know; manage. interesting: in the summer, after I said yes in May, I went back to Kampala, where I live in the summer, SCHWARTZ : Of course, the novel ends with this and I had taken everything there was about the question about who of us really is happy, and who milieu in which Thackeray wrote this novel. And in of us really has what we desire. And there is this there were actual manuscripts, notes from his question, in a way, is all this striving of Becky editor, from the tabloid, saying, “Listen, make Sharp’s really worth it? She’s admirable, and she your—you’re enjoying your heroine [Becky Sharp] rises to the top, but you also really make it clear too much. Got to make her basically bitchier. Make that—what is it that she’s really achieving? Amelia the sweeter person,” etc. He was trying to crank up the, you know, the volume on various NAIR : But it’s not just Becky Sharp, that question, things. And Thackeray would capitulate. But not what I—that’s why I love this novel, is that question happily. At least in my view, not happily. He would is asked of us all, and of us—all the characters. suddenly screech about Becky’s lack of maternal Everybody in Vanity Fair , like in life—all want instinct (which of course I preserved). But other something they cannot get. You know? (Laughs) things, other things. Like, he would say, oh—he And they’re all striving for something. And some of would make rumors up in one line, and then leave us are blind along the way, and some of us know them and not resolve them. Things like that. But I the journey we are on. But everybody, from old think that Thackeray was the ultimate outsider in his [George] Osborne, who loves his son but will not own society. He observed England, because he make peace with him; Rawdon [Crawley], who was raised somewhere else and then came. And in finally finds the love of his life, and they’re both making Becky Sharp, he actually created a great rascals—too much rascal, perhaps, for each outsider, like himself. An outsider to his society, but other… Whatever. Everybody—and [William] wanting to belong, you know, wanting to be an Dobbin, obviously, suffering for Amelia [Sedley], insider. and Amelia not even noticing Dobbin—everybody is wanting something more, you know? And in the SCHWARTZ : Right. Which obviously, would be a process, things can happen which make you theme that you’d be interested in, just because of oblivious to what is precious. your life. You’ve been an outsider—entered differently… SCHWARTZ : You worked on this with the great screenwriter Julian Fellowes. And could you talk a TRANSCRIPT: A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH MIRA NAIR PAGE 2 bit about how that process worked, how you SCHWARTZ : Yeah. And then there was a very collaborated? interesting moment in the end. You talk about maternal instinct. Just that little touch when her son NAIR : Sure. I spent about two months on my own, is taking his first steps, and she’s too busy with her first charting the map of life, as I call it, from the own painting… novel; and very clearly, you know, what I would want in addition to Becky Sharp, and how I would NAIR : Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s… I like that. I think want to see Becky Sharp, you know, because I that we all suffer from folly, and we shouldn’t think come… In Bombay, there’s a lovely phrase which— that we are above folly. “paisa va sul.” “Paisa va sul” is slang for the street, where they say, “Give me my money’s worth.” So I SCHWARTZ : Another thing about the opening scene very much want to make movies that are “paisa va that was so important for the rest of the film is that sul,” you know? So it is no fun to make a movie it’s a transaction, that there’s haggling over money.
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