Filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about her movie adaptation of

Mohsin Hamid?s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and relives her Salaam Bombay! days. This session was moderated by Shubhra Gupta, film critic, The Indian Express

Shubhra Gupta: At the special screening of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, you said that it was as difficult for you to make this film as it was to make Salaam Bombay! 25 years ago. Given that now you have built a body of work, what was so difficult about making this film?

The challenges were many and they took time. Firstly, to adapt a novel like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is essentially written as a monologue…One man, Changez, speaks to an American at a table in Lahore and the American does not say a word in the book, but in the movie, I wanted to know the American. You have to have a sense of who the other person is, so to create the American character, Liev Schreiber?s character, from scratch took time. The writing of the adaption took three years.

I look at a book as a spring board to my imagination and to what I want to bring to it as a cinematic piece. My inspiration to make The Reluctant Fundamentalist came not from the book first but from a visit to Lahore. It was a deeply moving experience because my father grew up in Lahore and raised us in Orissa like mini Lahoris without us even knowing that. So to go to Pakistan for the first time and to see what was deeply familiar and yet unfamiliar was extraordinary. I had never encountered a place like that. It was (a place of) incredible refined artistic and cultural expression which I did not know of. So that was the inspiration to make a modern tale on Pakistan. Nineteen months after that, I read Mohsin?s novel in manuscript and I felt immediately that this could be the spring board for me to make the modern tale that I wanted. Post-9/11, America has been engaged in a conversation with the world that is, I think, essentially a monologue, and it?s about time we hear from the other side. In the novel, there is this young man from Pakistan who loves America, who goes there, seeks his fortune, goes to Princeton, ascends Wall Street, falls in love, believes he has the American dream and then after 9/11, feels a series of slights and then greater, deeper humiliation and then a final betrayal that gets him to come back to Pakistan. But in the film, I wanted to know what he did when he returned to Pakistan. I wanted the third act of the movie to reflect also on the decade of politics that we have seen and suffered in the last 10 years. All that took a fair amount of time. I had the cast, I had the script and I had investors who were keen on this from the beginning but somehow, as it became more and more real, investors got nervous and dropped out. We had a global appetite. It?s how you understand fundamentalism, which is a huge thing, so investors came and went and finally, we just tightened our belts and made it digitally. We shot most of Lahore in Delhi and also in Lahore but we did the post-production in India. We saved money in any way we could, but we didn?t compromise the scope of the film. So I am very pleased to have a film that I can totally stand by. So, that?s what took five years.

Dilip Bobb: 9/11 is still a very sensitive issue in America, which is the largest market for any movie. How did you negotiate that?

What I am really keen to do in this film is to return to complexity. (George) Bush said, ?You are either with us or against us.? I call it a monologue from America?you never hear the other side, you never see the other side in the movies that we are seeing. This was why also I wanted to make this movie, to make characters that are not black or white. 9/11 was an enormously complicated moment in life. And there were complicated reactions to it. These were reactions that were, in a sense, censored to never be heard but Mohsin had the courage to speak of a reaction. He may not have shared that reaction but he observes that reaction and I observed that reaction too. So in making this film, I wanted to be unflinching about that. The movie has opened commercially on April 26 and it?s really doing business.

Aayush Soni: You used the music of Coke Studio Pakistan for the opening track of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Meesha Shafi has also sung a song for your movie. How did that come about?

One of the hugest inspirations that I felt when I went to Pakistan and even before going was what Coke Studio was doing, which is the modern sound of Pakistan, modern and ancient at the same time. So I went to meet Rohail Hyatt who is the producer of Coke Studio and I asked him to compose the whole score of the film. But he was too busy creating Coke Studios all over the world, so he became an ally of the project. So once I heard that song (Kangna by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Mohammed of Coke Studio), I immediately conceived of the ending of the movie?about two years before the movie was shot?with that song.

Coomi Kapoor: How much of your Indian background is reflected in your movie making?

I am usually drawn to stories that give me a way to interpret not just the Indian background but I would say my sub-continental background.

Nandini Nair: In the book, the love story plays a central part of Changez?s character and his relationship with Erica. From what you have been saying, the movie has a very global feel, it?s about fundamentalism etc, but as a director, how important was the love story to you?

The love story was vital because the love story is at the heart of what he feels and the final betrayal, in a way. But I must say I had problems with Erica as written in the book. The Erica in the book disappears gently into the night. She basically kills herself in some way and she is ethereal. I didn?t feel her in the book as a flesh and blood character as much.

Nandini Nair: Did you tell Mohsin that?

Yes, I tell Mohsin everything. So we changed Erica completely. Both Riz and Kate had an incredible chemistry which one can?t predict or direct, so that was a great gift. Also, it became a very deep and somewhat soulful chapter in the film.

Suanshu Khurana: When Danny Boyle made Slumdog Millionaire, there was this phrase of ?poverty porn? thrown at him. When you made Salaam Bombay!, did you expect that kind of criticism at that point or was it protected because it was an NFDC-backed project?

I don?t know why it didn?t happen but I am grateful it didn?t. But when we finished the film, we took it to Cannes. It was my first time in a feature film festival. I was a documentary filmmaker before that. I remember other filmmakers had these buttons advertising their films. So we would take those buttons and cut up (pictures of) Salaam Bombay! and stick them on to those same buttons with cellotape. That was my publicity budget and then the movie was shown and it was a success. We won everything, we sold it all over, and only two days later, I came back to India because India was my audience and India is where I really wanted it to open…But NFDC?s chaap is not the best chaap of all, especially back in those days, when they?d say, arey kaun dekhega yeh picture…I don?t want to compare movies but (Slumdog and Salaam Bombay!) are very different movies, so you know they require different treatment.

Amrita Dutta: Could you take us back to the Mira Nair who made Salaam Bombay!? How did you go about it?

I was making a film in 1984, about cabaret dancers in Ghatkopar, called India Cabaret. I was living with them in their tenement flat in Antop Hill. Every night, we would stagger home from the night club around 2 in the morning, they would fall asleep on the floor and at about 4 in the morning, this boy would come into their flat with hot tea and then, it was a fantastic reversal of roles where the dancers would say to the little boy, nacho hamare liye. He knew one song, I am a disco dancer. He would give these girls tea. When you live in Antop Hill, you are surrounded by street kids in every street corner and the thing that really got me was their unbelievable spirit of life against anything. They did not have anything but they had no self-pity and great flamboyance, and I was moved by that. When we showed India Cabaret at the film festival in Hyderabad, 1,500 people came to see the film because they thought it was about sex, and it wasn?t. The film is in the language of Bombay, which is a language that is so full of wit and humour, but it was never heard on Indian screens. Hindi dialogues were very formal at the time. The way the film was received gave me the courage to think that I could make a film about street kids. I was so inspired by their language, how they speak and think. My friend and I lived with a gang of ragpickers for four months on Grant Road, did everything they did and we then went off and wrote a screenplay based on all their stories and our imagination.

Paromita Chakrabarti: Many of your films have been adaptations of novels. How do you zero in on the text? Do you look for something that appeals to the global audience or something that has a resonance with you?

No, it is only about resonance with me. Vanity Fair was offered to me by a studio because they had had a big success with Monsoon Wedding, which they had distributed, and they thought a female-centric novel and a female director would be a good situation. What they didn?t realise was that Vanity Fair was one of my favourite novels while growing up. I figured I could tell the tale about not just a girl?s rise from rags to riches but how this happens in a hierarchical society like England. And Namesake came from a completely personal experience of losing a parent in a country which was not her home. As I said, I lived with my in-laws?my mother-in-law was from east Africa?and we took her to hospital in New York. She never came out of hospital and we had to bury her in New Jersey. It was the first time that I had lost someone so close to me and it was in that melancholy that I read Jhumpa?s book. Nine months later, we were shooting the film.

Ishita Bedi (student, Amity International School, Mayur Vihar): You have always chosen the unconventional route to filmmaking. How does it feel to go off the mainstream and take risks?

I like the adrenaline of risk and not just risk vis-?-vis the mainstream. The mainstream is a strange term, my films are not mainstream as one thinks of mainstream, in the sense that they don?t have heroes or heroines. But they make as much money or they have a much huger audience, which is what I would say is mainstream. It?s about going where it makes your heart beat faster and it?s about going towards where your subject is living for two to three years because it can take that long. The next thing I am doing, for instance, is is to take Monsoon Wedding as a musical to Broadway. I could fail, perhaps, but this is something I want to do.

Debesh Banerjee: Most of your films have been from the West, from Hollywood, with you as the filmmaker. Do you feel there is a language of cinema that works in the West and those films don?t work in the subcontinent?

Most of the films are not in the West. I have always been greedy for an international audience, but the atmosphere has changed in India now with distribution. So when I made Salaam Bombay!, I made it for Liberty Cinema where the kids go to watch films and fortunately, it worked there and worked everywhere else. I don?t like to change my work because it will go to Cannes or the Oscars. But when I made Mississippi Masala in 1991, I didn?t think of it really as a film for India as I didn?t have the distribution infrastructure to go against the big blockbuster. But now, with the Indian scene changed, I believe that any film of mine can work anywhere. Cinema, when it?s good, can work anywhere.

Shalini Langer: How do you explain the success of Monsoon Wedding? And what?s happening to the Shantaram project?

When I was teaching cinema in South African townships, the mantra was how to make something out of nothing, which was inspired greatly from the dogma method of films that Denmark had come up with, when you don?t know what a financier is like, stars etc. Then I thought to myself, I am teaching this but can I make that myself? Could I go back to the basics again? This is how Monsoon Wedding came about?just to make a movie in 30 days, just to make a movie literally about my family dining table. Then Sabrina (Dhawan), my writer, and I cooked up this story so it was made without expectation. I went to Cannes and raised a million dollars without the script. Then we wrote the script which is a huge

plot?there are five plots in Monsoon Wedding. It?s a very complicated film yet we only had that million dollars and I didn?t want to go back and ask for more. So we made it

very quickly.

But Shantaram…I am very close to that idea. We did everything, we had an amazing screenplay and everything was good but the Writers? Guild of America went on strike and the strike wasn?t resolved for 100 days. So you couldn?t go ahead and break the solidarity of that and you had to not work. But 100 days was a long time for Johnny Depp not to be occupied and and he went off. The project is still there, owned by Warner Brothers. I am hopeful it will rise again but right now, I don?t see any movement.

Kabir Firaque: I read somewhere that Riz Ahmed was denied a visa and you had to lobby for it. What was the reason, was it because he was born in Pakistan?

No, he wasn?t born in Pakistan. When you are denied your visa, they don?t give you any reason. We believe he was denied the visa because he had gone to Afghanistan and to Pakistan and he?s just a young man and he?s a Muslim. They put it together. The reason he?d gone to those countries?of course, he comes from Pakistan?but he had gone to Afghanistan because he had made a film called Into the World.

Transcribed by Prawesh Lama and Ruhi Bhasin