Word: monsoonal
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...setting up the International Behenji Brigade, a Bombay production house with the backing to make three low-budget Asian movies, and Maisha, an annual "filmmakers' laboratory" in Uganda for screenwriters and directors from East Africa and South Asia. And then there's the small matter of transforming Monsoon Wedding into a $14 million musical, complete with a wedding tent that Nair plans to assemble over the audience during each performance...
...Then again, Nair's best work is often her most frantic. She shot Hysterical Blindness in just 28 days?two days faster even than Monsoon Wedding. "It was 17-hour days for four weeks," says Lewis. "Mira's eyes were just wide and beaming through all of it. She's the most visionary director I've ever worked with." Naseeruddin Shah, who plays the father in Monsoon Wedding, adds: "She's a dynamo. We'd be filming at 3 a.m., and she'd still be generating this energy that affected us all." Vanity Fair star Witherspoon was similarly struck...
FILM: The director of Monsoon Wedding takes on Thackeray...
...taken to introducing herself this way: "I'm Mira Nair. Rhymes with fire." The director of acclaimed independent films like Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding offers the mnemonic to help people pronounce her name. But it could also be a warning. Nair is fiercely passionate about everything, especially the way she makes her movies...
...best of her films have been authentic depictions of the Indian diaspora, small in scope and locale but with themes universal enough to have generated a warm and lucrative Western following. Monsoon Wedding, which cost just over a million dollars, earned almost $14 million in limited release. Audiences have been enthralled by Nair's signature carnivalesque style and her craftiness at tying down epic scenes, like Wedding's elaborate, traditional rain-soaked Indian nuptial ceremony. So at first glance, her latest undertaking, a $23 million adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, may come as something...