Mira Nair, internationally acclaimed director of Monsoon Wedding and other feature films and documentaries, was guest of honor at "An Evening with Mira Nair," a discussion, accompanied by film clips, regarding the filmmaker's life and career on Saturday, May 3, 2003. The event was moderated by film, stage, and television actor John Lithgow.

Some excerpts from the evenings discussion.

On the transition from making documentaries to feature films.

I came from the school of cinema verité documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room. After seven years of making those kinds of films - which I love -- I was struggling to find an audience. I began to get impatient. I want to make things happen myself: gestures, light, the storytelling. What I love about documentaries, which is always stranger than fiction, is the inexplicable nature of it, the idea to amalgamate both these things lead to "Salaam Bombay." There is a fiction camera but it's working with real people, so the frame is heightened and informed by life but aesthetically influenced by many things.

About Financing for her films.

There was a time when I would go with documentary films under my arm and show them to any union, any working class women's group, anyone who wanted me. Anyone who wanted could have my films and me. That's pretty much how I made a living in America. I took a Greyhound bus for six weeks around universities with these films. I would charge $300 an appearance.
And with Mississippi Masala I remember when the Studio head said that it was a problem that none of the leads were white, I said, "Don't worry. All the waiters will be." That was of course the end of it!

On Monsoon Wedding and her collaboration with Sabrina Dhawan, the screenwriter of "Monsoon Wedding.

I was teaching at Columbia Film School and Sabrina was introduced to me as one of the best students there. We come from the same milieu, a middle-class Punjabi society in Delhi. We started to talk about the fact that there's nothing we had really seen that represented contemporary Indian life, certainly not life as we know it and live it. Sabrina had many ideas, such as wanting to make a portrait of a single woman's life in Delhi. We also wanted to tell a story of abuse, so we put it all together and she wrote this screenplay that I encouraged and saw through.

On the making of Monsoon wedding.

I made this film to inspire young people, because it was made out of nothing. The point of the film was to shoot it in 30 days, to do it very simply but imaginatively, to show people that their story can be told using very simple means.
The thing is that films are associated with millions of dollars, special effects, and this kind of mystical other world. This film was designed to make something out of nothing, to make something of your everyday object or event. I was testing myself, going back to basics, challenging myself.

On The kids in Salaam Bombay

I have set up Salaam Balak Trust, from the proceeds of Salaam Bombay. The Trust has managed to transform the lives of almost 5,000 street children. Salaam Balak Trust had just three centers eleven years ago but has now grown to 17 centers.

Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in India and educated at Delhi University and at Harvard. She began her film career as an actor and then turned to directing award-winning documentaries, including So Far From India and India Cabaret. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988; it won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival and 25 other international awards. Her next film, Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the American South and Uganda, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival including Best Screenplay and The Audience Choice Award. Subsequent films include The Perez Family (with Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Chazz Palminteri), about an exiled Cuban family in Miami; and the sensuous Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which she directed and co-wrote.

Mira Nair directed My Own Country based on Dr. Abraham Verghese's best-selling memoir about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Made in 1998, My Own Country starred Naveen Andrews, Glenne Headly, Marisa Tomei, Swoosie Kurtz, and Hal Holbrook, and was awarded the NAACP award for best fiction feature.

Nair returned to the documentary form in August 1999 with The Laughing Club of India, which was awarded The Special Jury Prize in the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels 2000.

In the summer of 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding in 30 days, a story of a Punjabi wedding starring Naseeruddin Shah and an ensemble of Indian actors. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, Monsoon Wedding also won a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and opened worldwide to tremendous critical and commercial acclaim.

Her next feature was an HBO original film, Hysterical Blindness. Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film stars Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis and Gena Rowlands. Thurman and Lewis play single women looking for love in all the wrong places, while Rowlands, who plays Thurman’s mother, adds to her daughter’s hysteria when she finds Mr. Right in Ben Gazarra. The film received great critical acclaim and the highest ratings for HBO, garnering an audience of 15 million.

Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Nair joined a group of 11 renowned filmmakers, each commissioned to direct a film that was 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame long. Nair’s film is a retelling of real events in the life of the Hamdani family in Queens, whose eldest son was missing after September 11, and was then accused by the media of being a terrorist. 11.09.01 is the true story of a mother's search for her son who did not return home on that fateful day.

In 2003, Nair directs the Focus Features/Granada Film production of the Thackeray classic, Vanity Fair, a provocative period tale set in post-colonial England. Reese Witherspoon plays the the female lead, and filming began early 2003 in Bath, England.

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