Mira Nair (born 15 October 1957) is an Indian film director, actress and producer based in New York. Her production company is Mirabai Films.She was educated at the prestigious Miranda House of Delhi University and then at Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! (1988), won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and was a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She used the proceeds of the film to establish an organisation for street children, called the Salaam Baalak Trust in India. She often works with longtime creative collaborator screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard.She has won a number of awards, including a National Film Award and various international film festival awards, and was a nominee at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards and Filmfare Awards. She was also awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007. In 2012 she was awarded India's third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan by President of India, Pratibha Patil.Her most recent films include Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, The Namesake and Amelia.
Credits are often set in an unusual typeface. End credits often feature pictograms, with the credit reel ending on a pictogram, as in Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra.
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'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' is an exercise in personal healing and reconnection. There are elements of my own family and me that have felt impacted by the events of the past decade. The film is an attempt, among other things, to knit the pieces back together. Not by denying the tensions that have appeared, but by illustrating the ways in which we can navigate them and be human despite them.
2
My father was educated in Lahore, before the partition of India. When I went there in 2004, I was dazzled by the ocean of familiarity - in terms of music, culture and food - but even more by the largeness of spirit of the people there. We are hardly ever given anything but bad news about Pakistan, and I want people to know that it has much more than one face.
3
I am an independent film-maker first and foremost. I have always cut my own cloth.
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They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'
5
People ask me this, but I've never sought to be on an A-list. I've done my own thing and my own thing has thankfully now brought me an audience.
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But if I have an obsession at all, it is with hands. I love hands and I love lips. I never cast lipless actors. So Kenneth Branagh, no thank you. It's a weird thing but I do have these two obsessions.
7
I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the world.
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I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.
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I like to be unabashed, which is an Indian trait, both emotionally and visually. It's important to have a circus to play with.
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I guess that would be Indian, in a way. We are used to no privacy. We are used to a lot of people in a room, sleeping on mattresses.
11
I was seen as an outsider in the beginning and then an object of great envy. All the national directors wanted to be international. They would come up to me and say, "If I cast Michael Caine and Sean Connery, do you think this will make it?" There was this fascination with the international that was totally wrong-headed.
12
I would say that the audience in India is very important for me. Not for every film, of course, and certainly not for Hysterical Blindness, but for films that have come from my heart, like Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding.
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...I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis. It does not take you many places.
14
What is really important to me is a sense of humour and a mischief about life. Life is just too boring otherwise.
15
I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find those that are considered to be on the outside extremely inspiring. They are the people who see through the double standards, like the kid in Salaam Bombay and the courtesan in Kama Sutra.
$950,000
