'In many ways Monsoon Wedding is an Irish film, with those extended families and all the physicality and the warmth Irish people have,' director Mira Nair - born in India, living in Uganda and New York - tells Michael Dwyer
A few hours after arriving in Galway last weekend, the Indian director and former Loreto girl, Mira Nair, was looking positively radiant, belying the fact that she had flown overnight from Uganda to London and on to Shannon, from where she was driven to Galway. What's her secret? "As soon as I got here I did my yoga," she says, tucking into tea and a chicken sandwich. "I stood on my head. It really helps me. You should try it. And then I had a wonderful massage."
The last time I had seen her, she looked distinctly nervous. It was the morning of September 12th last year, and her film, Monsoon Wedding, was the first to be screened at the Toronto Film Festival after the horrific events of the previous day in New York and Washington DC.
"That was a cathartic screening," she says. "I feared it so much because I wasn't sure if we should go ahead with it or not. There was a great feeling of liberation at the end, when the audience responded so warmly."
She received a similar reception on her visit to Galway Film Fleadh where she was the subject of this year's tribute programme - with screenings of many of her films, including Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding. Last Saturday afternoon, characteristically exuding infectious enthusiasm for her subject, she gave the annual film director's masterclass to an enthralled audience in Galway.
"In many ways Monsoon Wedding is an Irish film," she says, "with those extended families and all the physicality and the warmth Irish people have."
Uganda is now her second home, she says. "I have a home in Manhattan where I spend eight months of the year, and I live in Uganda for the rest of the year. It's the home where I shot the Ugandan scenes for Mississippi Masala - that beautiful bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria. I am a gardener and as soon as the school year ends in New York, my son, Zohran, who is 11, and I go back to Uganda, where I'm immersed in planting indigenous trees. I've planted about 65 of them so far. My husband is from Uganda. He is an academic, a political scientist and a political activist. He wouldn't even know who Julia Roberts is!"
Now 44, Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, the daughter of a civil servant. "I was educated in Simla at a Catholic boarding school run by nuns, Loreto College. I can sing you 20 Irish songs. 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o'. I know them all. So I really like to come here. A few years ago I spent two weeks in Connemara, giving classes at the Moonstone Lab for film students, and I had a wonderful time."
As a student at the University of New Delhi, she was active as an actress in repertory theatre in India. "That's what I thought I should do in life," she says "Mostly, I was involved with political protest theatre in Delhi, and we did a lot of very interesting experimental theatre. I came to America in 1976 on a scholarship to Harvard, thinking I was an actress. But I didn't have any interest in musicals like Oklahoma!"
Instead she gravitated towards film. "I made cinema verité documentaries for about seven years, but I was getting very tired waiting for things to happen, and frustrated by the struggle to find an audience to see documentaries. I wanted to reach people. I was planning a documentary on the street kids of Bombay and I decided the best way was in a fictional form. What I did was create an amalgam of the theatre world I knew, the film world I had learned about, and the fiction world I was learning about.
"I worked with about 130 street kids, chose 24 of them, and spent seven weeks in a workshop with them. I hung out with a gang of them to get to know their world, on the streets, playing cards with them, going to movies with them. Then we created our own screenplay, which went through many drafts before we made the film."
The result was her auspicious feature film début, Salaam Bombay!, which could have been very sentimental, but instead was rooted in the tradition of the Italian neo-realist cinema.
"It was tough and it was truthful," she says. "I was happy that people were shocked to hear that a woman had made the film. We agonised over the ending. How could this boy go home? He was no longer a boy. He had murdered a man. In a metaphorical and in a real way, he couldn't go home again."
To her delight, the film was selected for one of the sidebar sections at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and, to her amazement, it won the prestigious Camera d'Or prize for the best film by a first-time director.
"The day after we finished the film, we took it to Cannes and we were poor as church mice," she says. "Winning the Camera d'Or was astonishing - and it was worth $3,000, which was great because I was completely in debt after making the film. And then when we won, we sold the film overnight to distributors all over the world.
"Suddenly everyone wanted it. I was selling it myself. I was still fielding phone calls at six in the morning as I sat there in my little pension. It was kind of overwhelming."
Achieving success abroad helped greatly in drawing attention to the film in India and avoiding problems with censorship. "It could have been censored for so many reasons. There was the kiss, the first direct and lasting kiss shown in an Indian movie. Then there was the theme of child prostitution, which they would not want shown in India. They generally would not want things to be shown as they really are."
However, none of the main Indian distributors wanted to touch the film and it was released by an inexperienced young distributor - and played for 27 weeks.
Proving that her compassion for the film's subject did not stop after the film was finished, she set up a Salaam Bombay! school in the city. "When I was doing the workshop before making the film, I decided to finance a centre for street kids," she says. "The only thing on offer for them was this kind of rehabilitation, where they are taken off the streets, given a bath and dinner on Fridays, and that was that. We created our own centres after the film was released.
"I hired a child psychologist, a fantastic woman, who was the mother hen of the kids when we were making the film, and we set up a baalak trust.
"We created three centres - in Bombay, Delhi and Orissa - and now after 12 years we have 17 centres, all based on the same premise of 35 kids, no more, and very hands-on and personal. The centres are all self-sufficient now. The proceeds from the premières of my films all go to them. It's a fantastic result."
Her most recent film to arrive in this country, the exuberant yet hard-edged Monsoon Wedding, is her first to be set in the upper-middle-class New Delhi milieu where she grew up.
"The storyline did not come from my life, but everything else did," she says. "The furniture, the crockery, the paintings, the clothes, the saris, the jewellery - they all came from my house. There's not a single extra in the film. Everyone in it is a real person in Delhi who lives like that, so it's very authentic."
She rose to the challenge of establishing dozens of different characters and deftly integrating them within the film, which was shot in just 30 days. "That was my fault," she says, "putting us all under such pressure because I'm sure I could have raised more money to allow us to shoot for longer than that. But because we only had 30 days, we were so rehearsed and primed because we had to be. We were shooting four scenes a day, which is very unusual. What we had going for us, and I didn't realise this until afterwards, was the energy which everyone put into the film."
Monsoon Wedding continued her collaboration with the Irish-American cinematographer, Declan Quinn, which began when they worked together on Kama Sutra in 1996. "In my view, the relationship between the director and the cinematographer is always erotic, but without sex," she smiles. "I loved Declan's work on The Ballad of Little Jo, so we talked and we got on very well. We embarked on Kama Sutra, which had to be one of the most brutal and challenging epics, again made on a peanut.
"Declan is a poet of light, and like me, inspired by contemporary photography. Another big thing for me was that he was steeped in the documentary as well as the fiction world, because the stuff of life is the stuff of my films, and I need that kind of openness and spontaneity to embrace that."
They also worked together on Hysterical Blindness, a US cable TV movie to be shown on HBO next month. "It's American Bleak, Bollywood-style," she laughs. "I know that sounds facetious, but it's true. It's a working-class drama set in New Jersey in the 1980s. Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis play these girls with that awful big hair of that era, and it deals with the lengths they go in looking for love - this hysterical blindness that afflicts them as a result."
Most recently, joining up with Quinn again, she has filmed her contribution to 11/09/01 - an anthology of 11-minute films exploring different aspects of the events of September 11th. It is the work of 11 international directors - among them also Sean Penn, Ken Loach, Samira Makhmalbaf, Danis Tanovic, Claude Lelouch and Shohei Imamura - and it will be released as a compendium on September 11th next.
Nair's film is based on the true story of a Pakistani-American family in Brooklyn,whose son did not return home that day.
"He was an ambulance worker and a research assistant at a university," she explains. "His parents thought he was one of the thousand Muslims who were captured and put in detention after the attacks. Five days or so after his disappearance, the New York Post came out with headlines wondering if he was a terrorist. Suddenly, the whole 20 years that family had lived in America was turned upside down, and they were ostracised. They weren't particularly religious, but they went to Mecca, looking for guidance.
"Finally, six months later, they got a call saying his remains had been found in the World Trade Centre. He had gone there to offer his services as an ambulance worker. So, overnight, the American press changed their tune and declared him an American hero.
"The mayor came to his funeral and he was buried with full honours. At the funeral, his mother took the microphone and she said: 'First they called you a terrorist and now they are calling you a hero. Maybe if your name was Jesus or David, it would have been a very different story.' "