Filmmaker Nair finds inspiration in real-world experiences

Filmmaker Nair finds inspiration in real-world experiences

BY LINDSEY FIELDER
Rice News staff

Filmmaker Mira Nair called on each member of the creative community to represent themselves in their work — this is the role of an artist in society.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Filmmaker Mira Nair, well-known for “Salaam Bombay!” and “Monsoon Wedding,” talks with guests at Wiess President’s House before her April 10 lecture, the final installment in the 2005-06 President’s Lecture Series.

“There should be no borders within art,” she said. “Only those who embrace the world fully will truly know themselves.”
Nair presented the final installment of the 2005-06 President’s Lecture April 10 to an audience filled with members of Houston’s East Asian community. Titled “Between Two Worlds: An Evening With Mira Nair,” her talk was this year’s Dominique de Menil Lecture.

Growing up in India, Nair was first inspired by traditional mythological traveling theater. “I was taken to schoolyards where two people would come with a tiny prop and in that amazing environment they would build a drama of complete good against evil,” she said. “They would make the entire drama of humanity come alive to me.”

At age 16, Nair joined a playwright in Calcutta who would bring amateur actors together and construct the entire play with the assembled group. The first play Nair worked on was about political apathy. They took the play to the streets and engaged people in the city.

Three years later, she came to the U.S. to study theater. “People don’t believe me, but I saw ‘Love Story’ and decided to apply to Harvard,” Nair said. “I figured this was a big place, they must have money, and I needed a full scholarship.”

She received that scholarship and wanted to study political theater. “But lo and behold, all I found was ‘Oklahoma!’” she said, “a play that did not have much to say to me.”

She stumbled into documentary filmmaking and over the next seven years made five documentary films. “Each film explored questions in India, questions that got under my skin and refused to let me go,” she said.

Her first films were based on people she experienced in real life, from a worker at a local subway stand to the street kids she found while working on a documentary about exotic dancers in Bombay.

“I struggled to find a real audience,” Nair said. “I didn’t realize how hard it would be to make a film that would change people and government policy.”

Nair said now more than ever, the world needs the art of filmmaking. “In this post-Sept. 11 era where the borders of the world are being cemented into huge walls between one set of beliefs over another, we need cinema to reveal our tiny local worlds in all their glorious particularity,” she said. “In my experience, when I’ve made a film that’s done full-blown justice to the truth and the specific idiosyncrasies, that’s when it crosses over to become surprisingly universal.

“I always say: ‘Never treat what you do as a stepping stone to something else. Do everything fully and completely, and only at its fullest do you know where it might lead you.’”