THERE are two kinds of films in the world, according to Mira Nair.
No, not documentary and fiction. Although the Indian-born director, who divides her time among New York; Kampala, Uganda; Mumbai and New Delhi, has made both — beginning her post-Harvard career with documentaries such as “India Cabaret,” a 1985 profile of dancers, before jumping to fiction with the 1988 Oscar-nominated “Salaam Bombay!” — that’s not what she means. Nor is she talking about the perceived difference between Western and Indian cinema, what one might call the Hollywood/Bollywood divide. “I’m greedy,” she says, “in terms of getting audiences on both sides of the world.”
And how.
In town recently to promote “The Namesake,” an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling novel about an Indian immigrant couple in the United States and their American-born son, Nair spoke with almost equal excitement about her next two projects. The first, a 12-minute film she’s directing for a package of AIDS awareness shorts called “AIDS Awake,” which she’s also producing, will star some of the biggest names in Bollywood: Actors from the so-called chalu cinema of India. “That means cool cinema, sexy cinema,” she says with a laugh, “not boring lectures on social welfare.”
The second is an adaptation of “Shantaram,” Gregory David Roberts’ “monumental” semiautobiographical 2003 novel about a heroin addict who escapes from an Australian prison to the Bombay slums of the 1980s, impersonating a doctor before finding himself. Scheduled to begin shooting this fall, the film will star Johnny Depp. “He really is desperate to do this film and has been for a while,” says Nair, 49.
Despite routinely working with big Hollywood names (Reese Witherspoon starred in Nair’s “Vanity Fair” in 2004); despite turning down an offer from Warner Bros. to direct the forthcoming “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (it conflicted with “The Namesake”); despite directing Uma Thurman in HBO’s 2002 chick flick “Hysterical Blindness,” Nair still considers herself an independent director. Even if the definition of the indie filmmaker and the studio player is, as in her case, increasingly ambiguous.
“I’m a team player,” she says of the ambiguity. “I’m not someone who — I mean, I am strong and wild, but I do like to bring the team with me. I’m not someone who has a highhanded approach to it all.” Long fascinated in her work with the theme of the outsider (the notion of cultural dominance and who gets to define the Other), Nair slips comfortably between worlds.
But the indie/studio schism is, she believes, pretty arbitrary.
Rather, if the filmmaker had to make a distinction between types of moviemaking, it would be between films that, in her words, “get under your skin” and those that don’t. “The Namesake” clearly did.
“It just possessed me,” she says of her response to Lahiri’s story of culture clash and family, which resonated less with Nair’s feelings about being the Western-educated daughter of Indian parents than with her feelings about being the Indian mother of a completely Americanized teen-age son. “I had to make it.”
Dropping work on adaptations of Tony Kushner’s play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Hari Kunzru novel “The Impressionist,” Nair threw herself into the film, but not without remaining flexible about her artistic vision. It was, in fact, her 15-year-old son who talked her out of casting a Bollywood star in the title role of the American-born Gogol and into the riskier idea of giving the heavily dramatic part to someone like ... Kal Penn.
“I never heard of him,” Nair says of the American performer of Indian descent known primarily for his 2004 turn as a stoner with the munchies in “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” That was before her son and his best friend showed Nair clips of Penn on the Web. “I looked at him,” Nair says, “and I thought, he’s a goofy, charming comic, but ... I want a dashing young man. I mean, I just — I didn’t even think about it.”
Next thing she knows, Penn’s begging her himself. “I get this very beautiful letter from Kal, like a couple of months later, saying, ‘You know, I’m an actor because of you.’”Apparently, as an 8-year-old boy in New Jersey, he had seen Nair’s “Mississippi Masala.”
“‘Seeing people like me on screen gave me the courage to be an actor,’” Nair says he wrote her. Long story short: He flew to Nair’s studio in New York and sold her. More than anything else, she says, it was his hunger for the job that impressed her.
It was Penn’s passion that Nair could relate to, although, unlike Gogol’s character, who reconnects to his roots over the course of the film, her ties to India are still deep. She has a kind of fierceness that flares up whenever she’s forced to explain her last name for Westerners who can’t pronounce it (“Nair,” she says, with a sigh, “like ‘fire’”).
Though Nair doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “a cultural ambassador for India,” neither, she says, is she willing to assimilate so much that she loses her identity. Unlike Penn, for example, whose given name is Kalpen Modi but who works mainly under his Americanized moniker, she bristles at any suggestion that she conform to Western notions about fitting in.
“I will not make it easy for you,” she says, scoffing at the thought that something as superficial as a name change might make her feel less like the Other she’s so fascinated with in her films. “Even though my name is really easy, I think, I refuse to succumb to your myopia and your ignorance.”
The same principle applies to her films, whether it’s a job such as “Hysterical Blindness” or a labor of love such as “The Namesake.”
“I’ll never make something in a half-assed way,” she says, “even though it’s not coming from within my fabric. No point.”
