India will arrive when Indians go to Hollywood and we don’t much notice, which is not something about to happen the day after tomorrow. But there can be a twist to this story—it’s a more interesting arrival when Hollywood wants you and you say, No. Nair has been saying just that, and to some spectacular offers. Instead, she is taking a $10-million stage version of Monsoon Wedding to Broadway next year. As Hollywood’s theatrical cousin, Broadway is the other coast of America, not another world. But it’s still our story on world stage, not the dishearteningly usual opposite.
"And because Monsoon... lends itself very immediately to theatre," Nair tells Outlook over a quickish lunch on the sets of Vanity Fair in Luton, about 40 miles from London. It will not be cinematic sequences transferred to stage sets. For a start, "I think we’ll have to collapse the five plot lines in the film to three on stage". It’s "something in the wild", and more will change. Nair is doing it because it was offered. "And I came from theatre. I was an actress for many, many years. I love theatre, I love the stage." This will be her first go as director in theatre. "At first I never even considered directing it," she says. "But in my quest for a director, it’s become very clear that I should do it." Will it be very different? "I’ll discover."
And at the end of next year, she plans to begin shooting her next film Homebody/Kabul based on a play by the radical New York playwright Tony Kushner. "It’s an amazing cyclical tale about life under the Taliban and an expose of how America played with the Taliban. It’s also about a number of great characters. It will have a fab caste—Naseer and Jim Broadbent will be in it. And, I want Madhuri Dixit too. She doesn’t know yet. It’s a real interesting combination of a bunch of people whom I love and adore."
It will be distinctly not Hollywood when Nair could so easily, and richly, have gone that way. "After Vanity Fair, I have many offers to make bigger films. They are big, huge, but I’m not accepting them because I think every piece of work is a political act. What is important is to put ourselves and our stories on screen, people who are from the other half of the globe. While I’m doing Vanity Fair with as much of an embrace as I do any of my films, I can’t keep accepting offers that basically tell their stories."
Not that Thackeray’s story is really ‘their’ story, or that Nair is telling it as ‘they’ did in their sanitised period films. "I thought about it, whether I wanted to do a goron ka story. But it’s about people like us, the humanity of these characters is like the humanity of all of us. What I loved about Thackeray is that he saw through it. I love that, that he sees through the hypocrisy and the bullshit and the status aspirations. He opens people up. I have done that in my characterisations."
Nair promises a film that is far from those weak BBC distillations of the classics. "In this film, you should smell the frame, the shit on the streets, the difference in the classes. So, even if it’s about the upper classes, I have tried to jam every frame with the kind of details of life you never see in a period film."
So that when someone comes out of a stately home looking like, well, looking like that, they step past coalmongers shovelling coal, they are still among a sea of people stepping across horseshit and whatever else. Or take wigs, the one thing that does more than anything else to take a period film to its period. While the typical period film makes it the quaint crown of a romanticised past, Nair sees under it the unbathed Englishman. After dinner you follow the wig to the bedroom, watch it come off. The character recently under it then proceeds to scratch his head (and we shall see what else). It has become, Nair says, "a very funny film" even if stiff upper lips do not ease into smiles. Witherspoon has already referred in an interview to Nair’s treatment of the classic as "sensual avant-garde". And in an interesting twist, her real-life pregnancy has been written into the film’s script.
Vanity Fair is probably particularly suited to a director like Mira Nair. This was the novel famously without a hero, a book with characters who are not all good, not all bad, where endings aren’t just happy or tragic. "I am trying to celebrate that fact," says Nair. "While the spine of the story is the rise and fall of Becky Sharp, I am trying to make it a complete ensemble piece. I was joking with a friend that it’s an expensive Monsoon Wedding."
And while her films are all different, and she wouldn’t want it otherwise, Vanity Fair is just the film for the Nair touch. "I love the circus of life in my films," she says. "It will be very hard for me to do a film on two people sitting in a room eating sushi. Not my kind of thing, the minimalist stuff. I like the carnival, I like the layered, I like to pack density into every frame, I like the inexplicable grey areas. I like emotion but always with humour, and I like to make you laugh and cry within a few frames."
The Punjabi touch, almost. "The whole Punjabi sensibility is also about that," she says. "I love that about life, the humour when you’re down and out. It’s very close to the Cuban or the Latin one in the sense that nothing will keep us down." It’s the creativity of the street, "and I do love the street," she says. "I’m always inspired by people who are considered marginal and who almost to a ‘t’ I consider inspirational. That’s what I kind of go for. Of course, the visual banquet is essential. I wouldn’t even think of special effects, sci-fi and what not, things that are not about life."
That means, among other things, you can make this kind of good film a lot cheaper. And Nair is looking to teach other directors how. "In India, I’m being asked to set up a production company for lower-budget films, like Monsoon Wedding, which showed young people that you don’t need that much money to make an interesting film. You need to know what you have to say, and you need to have very much of the skill and discipline to realise it."
What’s missing with many Indian productions, she says, is the skill of screenwriting and production. "These are two things I abjectly miss when I am in India. Ek draft likh liya to ho gaya. We do eight drafts. But now there is a new wave. In five years the vocabulary of Indian cinema will change."
Be a little less of what Bollywood is today, but still within the flamboyant Bollywood style—"what I would hate to see happen is that this flamboyant vocabulary gets watered down to suit the international palette."
But there is space between Bollywood and Hollywood. "My cup of tea is what I want to do. When you do these huge films, you often have very little power. Because you are at the mercy of people who have their 50 million and their 100 million on the line, and you are no longer really an independent artist. You are at the mercy of that money and you have to return that money in a major way. So it’s not for me about money, it’s to do with freedom, or interpreting the world in the way I wish to interpret it. Otherwise there’s nothing, yaar."
