Embrace Life Completely
What Cinema Means to Mira Nair
“My mentors were Leacock and Pennebaker – people who taught us to film ’truth’, as un-manipulated as possible, This, of course, in quotations because cinema is never without manipulation.”
“I am of the firm opinion that economy and the dictum of ‘less is more’ are better than endlessly telling the same point again and again.”
“For me to make a film I have to be visually excited by it. In Hysterical Blindness there was something extraordinarily fascinating about 80s banality. It’s so easy to characterise this and make it a cartoon thing. You know, the big hair, the shoulder pads, the ugly era, as I called it. But it had to feel truthful. So number one was the style, the truthfulness of the film was very much the foundation.”
“I just want every frame to pulsate with some kind of life, and that’s the feeling of a handheld camera.“
“In some stylistic ways, Vanity Fair is not a departure at all: like Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!, it too is a swirling ensemble piece, dense and layered, about a certain society at a particular point of time.”