I need to go on a 'maun vrat' for a month: Mira Nair

Your latest film The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) is due for release. We’re at the iconic Taj Mahal hotel, one of the theatres of 26/11, India’s worst terror attack. Do you see any resonance for what happened here with what your film is all about?True, the terror attack was shocking but polarisation of any kind can never be right.  Terrorists-security personnel, India-Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim and like in the case of 9/11 Americans-the Muslim world, which got exacerbated  by George Bush’s policy which said you’re either with us or them... the dividing lines can simply go on increasing hate and suspicion or we can look at ways of addressing it like I have with TRF. It is like taking a lot of the hot political theories being bandied about and distilling them in a humane way.Elisabeth Wicki Endriss, the founder of the Bernhard Wicki Memorial Fund in an invite to receive the German film award for peace in July, has called you “a  defender of enlightenment and inviolability of human dignity.”(Blushes and covers her face). I’m not an emblem nor have ever nursed a desire to be one. I am a student of life and right from Salaam Bombay! I’ve let my work reflect what I see going on in the world around. In Monsoon Wedding too, amid all the song-and-dance I tried to break the prison of silence and delve into a world of secrets within families. The world, after all, is a combination of the brutal and the tender or to borrow a phrase of blood and jasmine. I just try to hold a mirror to that.You have said TRF is your most difficult film.Yes it is. Finding a way to adapt the book to a screenplay that worked was a big challenge. The book is a monologue and the film is a dialogue, with an edge-of-the-seat thriller finale so the pressure was huge. Much of the film happens in a rustic Lahore teahouse, where Changez (Ahmed), a Pakistani-born lecturer who worked on Wall Street for a spell, is interviewed by Bobby Lincoln (Schreiber), an American foreign correspondent.It took me a year and a half to find my protagonist in this brilliant actor-rapper Riz Ahmed. Once I’d cast him finding the people around him like Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, Kiefer Sutherland (pictured below, to the right of Riz Ahmed), Shabana Azmi or Om Puri was easier.Was the difficulty also connected with finding finances?Yes it was. You know the film collapsed twice after being set up. Investors would come in, agree and then things would fall apart. But I knew things will come together and never gave up hope. I know it has been said I approached Hollywood for funds, but clearly I’m not dumb. I know better than that.Are you unhappy that you could not shoot the entire film in Lahore, Pakistan?No one can deny the visual quality of Lahore but one has to be practical about these things. Unlike some misguided reports have claimed, I was never denied permission to go there and shoot. It was the insurance companies who were not too comfortable. Besides I didn’t want to be responsible for the safety and security of the cast and my team. We did shoot for four days in Lahore though and got all the outside shots.What was it like recreating Lahore in Delhi?You know in many ways Lahore is Delhi’s twin. One could say it is remarkably similar to how Delhi seemed around 50 years ago. We shot at Ajmeri Gate and it fits right in. As for the old house we’ve shot in, we found that it was indeed built by a Lahori who then migrated. But it will be unfair to not give credit to the excellent Pakistani team on board who helped in creating the right ambience with music, details like Benazir Bhutto election posters, etc.After all the sweat and toil, are you happy about the way TRF has been received?I’m very happy to see the response. You know we’d barely shot less than 40% of the film and it was immediately bought for India (PVR) and Pakistan at Cannes in May last year for a very good price. By the time we took it to the Toronto Film Festival in July after completion rights world-wide sold out.You have been called a culture-clash specialist, a film-maker caught between two worlds...(Laughs) I have lived most of my life in two countries, in fact I live in three now. This aspect has often rubbed off in my films too. Just like I was confused while growing up, you see some of that in my earlier work too. With TRF I make a complete return to complexity from the reduction to forced simplicity that we see around us. The character in TRF the book wants to make sense of labels like Pakistani, Muslim and others and asks why he can’t be all of them at the same time. In today’s globalised times, one needn’t even go out of the country. You can come from Aligarh to Mumbai and feel like you are in a different world.With TRF, as an Indian director making a Pakistani film across several continents, uniting a-list Hollywood talent with Hindi film legends, I am in a very happy space.   Sufi qawwalis, rap, Faiz’s legendary poetry and techno groove come together in TRF.My father grew up In Lahore. I grew up with Pakistani culture all around me...qawwalis, shayari, the Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry. I grew up in Delhi, but I had Lahore all around me. When I went to Lahore in 2004, I found an immediate connect with the dazzling sounds and sights of the place. This was not the Pakistan that the newspapers talked about. It just wouldn’t have been possible not use some of the brilliant music of this region in TRF, which begins with an eight and a half minute qawwali sequence… an original, traditional rendition by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Mohamed. What Michael Andrews has done with the tracks, which imbue the story with the American ethos too, just works brilliantly. You know, I was listening to Atif Aslam’s Mori Araj Suno in loop while in the thick of the movie and it would calm me down.

What next after TRF?Honestly for few days I want to go back to my home in Africa and keep busy with my garden and yoga. (Laughs) I need to go on a maun vrat for a month, given the amount of talking I’m doing for the TRF promotions. On a serious note though, I’m already in the thick of the production of a musical based on the Monsoon Wedding. The other project is Queen of Katwe with Disney. There is this brilliant chess prodigy, a 14-year-old called Phiona Mutesi from Kampala in Uganda whose family sells corn off the street. She’s a self-taught chess player who learnt playing with bottle caps from the time she was eight and is now a respected international chess champion.