Celebrated American director of Indian-origin Mira Nair is not one to
rest on her laurels.
After her latest work Vanity Fair earned the distinction of
being the inaugural film at the ongoing International Film Festival of
India in Goa, she is busy watching legendary Bengali film-maker Ritwik
Ghatak's films on DVD.
The reason is simple. Nair is drawing inspiration from Ghatak for her
next celluloid project The Namesake, based on a novel of the
same name by Jhumpa Lahiri.
'I am hugely inspired by the works of Ritwik Ghatak and parts of the
film will be in black and white,' Nair said referring to The
Namesake, which will star Konkona Sen Sharma, Irfan Khan and
American-Indian actor Cal Penn.
Hollywood actress Natalie Portman has also been offered a role. There
is also the possibility of Konkona's mother Aparna Sen featuring in
The Namesake. What has attracted Nair to Lahiri's novel is its
themes of identity, exile and homelessness of Indians migrating to the
United States or Britain.'I was touched by the world depicted in
the novelmoving from Kolkata to Cambridge and then to New York,' said
New York-based Nair who has already started shooting The Namesake
in Kolkata, where she is also learning Indian classical music.
After completing The Namesake, Nair said she proposed to
direct two more films The Impressionist and Homebody/Kabul.
Making Vanity Fair, as Nair points out, is a 'dream come true'
for her. She fell in love with Thackeray's book when she read it first
at the age of 16 and has gone through the novel a number of times
since then.
Vanity Fair has drawn mixed reviews in Britain and US and
part of the criticism is because of what was felt to be too much of
typical Bollywood stuff in it.
She said she had been offered to direct the celluloid version of
the fourth book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in J
K Rowling's best-selling series of adventures of the 13-year-old
wizard.
Asked what prompted to spurn the offer to make a Harry Potter
movie, Nair said it was 'The prospect of working with special effects
rather than flesh and blood. More importantly, spending three years in
London is what put me off.'
The trip to Goa to attend the film festival has given Nair an
opportunity to take a break from filmmaking though not from film
watching. She said she was happy that the festival has shifted from
big metropolises to an exotic place like Goa.
(Daily
Star)
Articles
Astrology
Oscar-Tango
