Embrace Life Completely
What Cinema Means to Mira Nair
"I have an eye and ear for paradox. That is life. The grey area where no one person is less or more virtuous than the other. For me the truth is far more interesting, far more strange, than fiction."
"In Salaam Bombay!, I wanted to use my influence in documentary film-making to bring an authenticity to the screen that has rarely been used in Indian film – to use the streets, the texture, the fabric and the colours of the city, and in this situation to use primarily children of the streets playing themselves."
"I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find that those who are considered to be on the outside are extremely inspiring. They are people who see through the double standards, like the kid in Salaam Bombay! and the courtesan in Kama Sutra."
"Looking at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, I find an enormous panorama of themes familiar to our society and to our cinema: A woman who defies her poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder, unrequited love, seduction through song, a mother’s sacrifice for her child, a true gentleman in a corrupt world… the catalogue of human stories remains the same."
"I can only make films about subjects that get under my skin and make my heart beat faster. I am not in the business of producing films which offer a pleasant way of filling a Sunday afternoon."