Embrace Life Completely
What Cinema Means to Mira Nair
"I come from documentary where you use what happens in front of you at that moment."
"The challenge in a feature film is to capture the sense of the instantaneous moment of a documentary. Documentaries have a certain edge as events seem to unroll before the camera. This is difficult to convey in the controlled environment of a featured film."
"We moved into the house where the film Monsoon Wedding takes place and we literally choreographed every movement of the handheld camera, as there are a minimum of 20 people in every shot. The idea was to make the audience feel they were in the middle of each scene."
"The planning has to be such that during the very act of shooting I am in a state of complete emptiness; sort of have a space in my brain so that it can happen and intuition can take over and I can work with what’s in front of me. That is a good example of the yin and yang of chaos and simplicity."
"Never forget the importance of the frame. How – in framing the environment – you artfully talk to the audience about how to see the world."