"My job is to choreograph chaos"

Filmmaker Mira Nair talks about "Monsoon Wedding," her homemade tribute to Bollywood that's breaking art-house records across North America.

By Adrienne Crew

Mar 13, 2002 | Indian filmmaker Mira Nair originally left her home in New Delhi to study sociology at Harvard, and her subsequent career continues to probe the boundaries of social interactions. In her films, Nair displays a fascination with the ways human beings adapt their cultural traditions to changing environments: Bombay street urchins in "Salaam Bombay!," exiled Cubans in "The Perez Family," African-born Indians resettled in the American South in "Mississippi Masala."

In her latest film, "Monsoon Wedding," Nair shifts her attention back to India to focus on her own Punjabi background. The film follows an upper-middle-class Delhi family gathered for an elaborate weeklong wedding celebration, filled with singing and dancing, during the monsoon season. It captures the paradoxes and pleasures of contemporary urban Indian society, a combustible marriage of ancient traditions, global consumer culture and high-tech communications.

Describing the film as a homemade and home-grown homage to the big-budget "Bollywood" musicals for which Indian cinema has become famous, Nair has produced a rollicking film about her homeland that comes with a universal appeal. Indeed, "Monsoon Wedding" won the top award for best picture at this year's Venice Film Festival and is breaking box-office records at art houses in New York and other cities throughout the United States. Catchy Indo-pop music, traditional Punjabi wedding songs and old-school tunes from musicals familiar to generations of South Asian moviegoers are incorporated into the film's soundtrack to support and comment on the five plotlines running throughout the wedding celebration.

Each narrative in "Monsoon Wedding" represents some aspect of love: The bride-to-be waits until the last minute to choose between her married ex-boyfriend and the groom selected by her family through a traditional marriage arrangement; the builder hired to erect the wedding pavilion silently courts the family maid; the bride's harried father discovers comfort in his wife and children; a bumbling cousin who grew up abroad flirts with another relative, a hot Delhi beauty; and a fiery unmarried cousin reveals a dark secret.

I spoke with Nair by telephone just after she'd returned to her New York home from a stint as jury president at the Berlin Film Festival.

What inspired you to make "Monsoon Wedding"?

The whole film was conceived in a spirit of self-imposed leanness. I wanted to make a lot of nothing, to consciously turn my back on big budgets and manipulations and excesses of any kind. I decided to make a film in 30 days even before I did the script. That way you can finance it, because there's nothing to lose! I wanted to make a self-imposed low-budget film, and then while writing the film it became a circus, with 68 actors and five plotlines and 30 days.

Did you have everything pretty much written by the time everyone had assembled at the start of the 30-day shoot?

Yes, the script had mostly been written but then it was consciously refined, sculpted and pared down and, in some cases, expanded while working with the actors during improvisations that took place during the filming. In order to achieve such a large film in 30 days, it eventually required much more mastery and discipline behind the camera.

Did you choreograph the dance scenes?

We worked with a great choreographer [in a studio] for about two weeks before shooting the first sequence and then he came to work on set with us. I'll never forget what he asked me. He said, "Do we have four days or five days for this sequence?" and I answered, "We have four hours." His jaw dropped. To shoot a big scene in four hours is unheard of in India. Well, anywhere, really. But we did it. "Don't worry," we said, "we'll go ahead and plot around it."

Did you look for dancing ability in your actors?

Because the film was really a homemade portrait of Bollywood, I didn't require a big-time Bollywood dancer to do it. The film was about people like us imitating Bollywood style. So I never tested the girl who I cast, I just hoped she could dance. I asked her and she said "Oh, I love to dance," that kind of thing. But I never auditioned her as a dancer.

Next Page: "That song the lovers hear on the radio -- that's a song my husband used to sing during our courtship"

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