Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, who lived in South Africa for several years and now lives in New York, returned to her native land to make her new movie Monsoon Wedding, a simple but large-scale depiction of an extended Delhi family as they prepare for a daughter’s marriage.
The film is an intense and interesting family drama filmed with a handheld camera that is both intimate and lush as it shows the rich family life and those connected to it through the wedding.
Nair made several documentaries before making her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay!, a gritty story of life among India’s poorest. ”To capture the inexplicability of life, that’s what cinema vérité documentaries do,” she says. ”To capture that in fiction is very powerful.”
Of Monsoon Wedding, she says: ”We wanted to see if it was possible to get down and dirty and make a film in 30 days, and to make a handheld film.
”[Scriptwriter] Sabrina Dhawan is also from Delhi and we said: ‘Let’s make a film about contemporary, modern India — our world’. We wanted to make a multifaceted film, a meditation on love, five inter-weaving love stories.”
The film had been scripted by Dhawan, but she, Nair and the cast spent two-and-a-half weeks in rehearsal before shooting began and cast members improvised around the characters as scripted. Part of the rehearsal process was an acting workshop run by veteran Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah, who plays paterfamilias Lalit Verma in the movie.
Nair’s South African associate producer and script supervisor, Robyn Aronstam (one of what Nair calls her ”lifers” — people who, she says, will work with her ”for life”), says it was an extraordinarily enriching process that many at first saw as a luxury on such a tight shoot but in fact was a necessity in making the film what it is.
”Eventually they got to working with the characters,” she says, ”but it was right from the base level up, from ground level. Naseeruddin questioned every action, every reaction, pinpointing it, making you find authenticity.”
The script was then adapted accordingly and tweaked in the light of what could be achieved in a short time on limited resources. ”You have to cut your cloth to what you can achieve,” says Nair. ”Right to the end, it was like that — we were saying, we can shoot only so much. We’ve got nine good pages but we can shoot only four, so let’s cut it down to how many shots I can do. So that was going on right to the end and it kept going on even in the editing. There was a lot written, even while I was dubbing, to make relationships clearer, and so on.”
Then, once filming was complete, there was a freak accident. One hundred metres of film was exposed to x-rays at an airport and wiped clean. Luckily insurance paid out and it turned into a godsend — Nair now had extra money to go back and reshoot, and to add more rain to a story that takes place in monsoon season. Originally the rain in the movie had had to be natural, especially in the final, climactic scene. But now Nair could afford to hire rain machines and dot rain about the movie wherever she chose. ”We used every challenge as an opportunity.”
Discovering the erasure of the film, says Aronstam, was ”devastating — but whatever comes along Mira trusts that it’s going to be in her interest in the end. She has an incredible optimism.”
Nair is also a collaborative director. ”Mira has a very strong vision,” says Aronstam, ”but she manages to incorporate the visions of the people she’s working with.”
Nair lived for about three years in South Africa where her husband was teaching at the University of Cape Town. Deeply interested in South African literature, music and culture, she was keen to make a film of the Athol Fugard novel Tsotsi but ”it fell apart at the last minute”.
She did, however, do some teaching here, an experiene that enriched her own work. ”I taught 26 kids from the townships — a small filmmaking workshop. I tried to tell these kids how to make something out of nothing, that that was the principle of living and of cinema. I come from India and I came from less than what these kids had. That principle led me to make a documentary called The Laughing Club of India, which is about the power of laughter. It came out really pure and beautiful and that same style led me to make Monsoon Wedding. Both were premised on the idea of making something out of nothing.
”What South Africa also gave me, which has changed my life and the rhythm of my films, is yoga — Iyengar yoga. The greatest teacher of Iyengar yoga lives in Cape Town. We have a yoga teacher on all of my sets and every day we do yoga before we start.”
Aronstam says the yoga classes have a unique function on Nair’s shoots. ”When you make a movie you suspend your reality, you suspend your life in every way, you become a family. If you’re working 12 hours a day an hour-and-a-half for yoga is very stablising, very bonding. It’s the only time of the day you have that space for yourself. It’s a gathering of inward energy, a balancing. Mira works in a very organic way and the yoga gives you a base for that.”