Word: nair
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard, Nair met and later married her photography teacher, Mitch Epstein; based in New York, the couple worked on each of her films together. She now lives in Uganda with her second husband and their two-years-old son. They bought the idyllic stone house in Kampala that Mina's family leaves behind at the outset of "Mississippi Masala." "I find myself wanting to put roots back into the homeland," she declares. "I just find myself going back there. That's why we've not had our child in America." Withdrawing from America, Nair dedicates herself to the flamboyance...
...Nair's idea for the interracial love affair in "Mississippi Masala" grew out of her experiences as an undergraduate in Currier House. "At the time," she explains, "there were very few of us [people of color]--both Black or Asian. And I sensed, for instance, among the black men that I was a Third World sister, somebody they could take out on date or go around with." Nair sought to complicate the Black or white model of race relations in America with what she calls a "hierarchy of colors," an insertion of brown in between, When Mina (Sarita Choudhury...
...even Denzel Washington...at least at first. Nair reports, "The thing he had the worst trouble with in "Masala" is that he refused to be acting like a man in love. He just said. `My God, you know, I'm too cool for that.' And I said, `I can't have it. It's the cornerstone of my movie, and you have to be in stupor in love...I said, `And don't you think that just because I am a woman, I want this love mush stuff. I have to have it.' It was a real, tight...
Despite her success, Nair's interests in people on the margins and in exile often leave her short of cash. "If you make films that are about people of color you have much less money to make them," she explains. After the critical acclaim she received for "Salaam Bombay"--a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival and a nomination for an Academy Award--Nair was approached by Hollywood producers who offered her money, but not to make the movies she wanted to make. "They send you the next sort of Meg Ryan comedy, and you can easily...
...Nair would be the first to admit, however, that she seeks a mass audience. "I find myself very much a commercial filmmaker. I really know that I want a big audience. I think in a quirky and funny and funky way, but I also know that I'm not thinking about that just for its own sake. I also think about it in a way that can be interpreted by a bigger audience. Because I want to reach them." In fact. Nair had a $30 million project lined up with Warner Brothers to make an epic movie about the life...