Mira Nair visits USC for discussion on her first movie ‘Salaam Bombay.’
Indian filmmaker Mira Nair visited the university last week. Her breakthrough film, “Salaam Bombay!” screened at the Nickelodeon on Tuesday evening and Thursday evening, she attended a screening of her 2001 film, “Monsoon Wedding,” in Gambrell Hall and did a Q-and-A.
Then, Friday morning at the Nickelodeon, students majoring in film, theatre and other areas joined Nair for an intimate Q-and-A where she graciously talked about her influences, her career and her films. When asked what her film-going experience was like in her youth and what films made her realize that someone directs a film, she said, “I grew up in a very small town, smaller than Columbia, called Bhubaneshwar, Odisha. There were 2,000 old temples in this place, but the roads were being built. At the time, my father was a civil servant, and there was no movie theater. There was one movie theater when I was about 10 years old that started there, and I exaggerate not, but it showed ‘Doctor Zhivago’ every bloody Sunday. It was just that. That was the only non-Indian film. And I wasn’t much of a Bollywood fanatic or anything of the sort. It was not that kind of town. It was tiny, not much bigger than a village. We used to have to go to the nearest city, which was 350 miles away, Kolkata, when I was 10 onwards and the first American film I saw was ‘Hatari!’ with John Wayne, and I’ll never forget it because it was a big film and it was animals and I was a young kid, and it was the American version of Africa. Now I don’t remember it much. So my film-going experience was desperately spotty. I did not even see, really, Indian films, and certainly not the serious Indians films of Satyajit Ray or people like him. The big influence for me was theater.”
She finally got into making documentary films, but she said, “Even my parents didn’t see my own films. In making documentaries, I was a novelty abroad, here, and I was a novelty at home because there was no way, no context, to see a documentary, but I loved it. I loved the drama of life in the way I had been trained which was not to manipulate documentary but to actually go find a character.”
She said her documentaries were “fairly successful. They went on television in many places; they won festival prizes. I used to go on the Greyhound bus and show them here to any university, any union, anybody who wanted them, but I wanted more. I wanted more. I wanted control over the storytelling. I wanted to work with light. I wanted to work with drama. And I wanted to, I wanted to have an audience. Mostly, I wanted an audience. And that’s what led me to make ‘Salaam Bombay!’ as a fiction film because working with street kids, either you make a hit-and-run kind of documentary, which would be less aesthetic, less control. So I decided to really bring my work in the theater and my work in documentary, and my work just loving people into an amalgam of creating a fictional version of a real situation.”
She spent almost all of the budget getting good equipment and shooting on 35mm, and it paid off.
The film sold around the world, put her name in the consciousness of the international film community, and earned a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination.