Mira Nair on 20 years of Monsoon Wedding, and helming its Broadway adaptation: The film hasn't left me for a moment

It has been 20 years since Mira Nair presented to the world her “reality-check version” of an Indian wedding. It made people as uncomfortable as monsoon weddings usually do. But it is also joyous, in the way letting your hair down and dancing in the rain is.

Nair was 44 when she made Monsoon Wedding with a motley group of actors, headlined by Naseeruddin Shah, and featuring several newcomers such as Shefali Shah, Vijay Raaz, Randeep Hooda, and Tillotama Shome, who have since built enviable filmographies.

Ahead of the film’s special screening at the upcoming JLF Soneva Fushi (Jaipur Literature Festival’s new Maldives chapter), the maverick filmmaker talks in detail about what got her to make the cult classic, how the camera was as important as any other character in the film, the various kinds of love that she explored through the story, how she ensured that she made a winner despite the limited budget and other constraints, and her upcoming projects after a COVID-induced break.

What inspired you to make Monsoon Wedding?

Several things. The first was this extraordinary movement in cinema in Denmark called Dogme 95, which was about telling stories without millions of dollars, men in suits, studio fellas, light, and in the Danish case, without music. It was essentially about stripping back to the basics of cinematic storytelling, and doing it the way one wants to do it. A great example of Dogme is Festen or The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg’s extraordinary film about a family reunion which I saw, and was enormously charged by.

A major musical blockbuster that I went to see with my whole family, and had a great time. But it had nothing to do with the reality of what our Punjabi weddings in Delhi were like. It was an inspiration in the sense that I wanted to make a reality-check version of what real family weddings in my community, the Punjabi community, and in our families were like.

The film was also inspired by the fact that my son, who was I think 10 at the time, had school holidays in the monsoon, and I wanted him to be around. I wanted to sort of squeeze in a movie during his three months off. I had the courage to make a free-wheeling handheld-camera film in the most torrential time of the year because I had made an odd and absurdist documentary the year before called The Laughing Club of India, about the strange and wonderful phenomenon of laughing clubs and people who take laughing seriously.

I was teaching film at Columbia University in New York City when we were editing this documentary that we shot in the rain in a handheld way. My assistant editor on it was Sabrina Dhawan, the smartest writer in my filmmaking class, a wonderful woman from my hometown Delhi, and 10 years younger than me. While cutting Laughing Club, we began thinking of Monsoon Wedding as an idea. We thought let’s make our own Punjabi version.

Monsoon Wedding feels as if it was shot through a camera hidden inside a shadi ka ghar. You let the audience in on the drama as though they are seeing it all first-hand. How did you arrive at this style of filming? 

The premise and the style of it was always a handheld, pulsating camera as if it was a fly on the wall. I come from the tradition of cinéma vérité — the cinema of truth, of reality. This is what I studied as a young filmmaker in Cambridge Massachusetts with Richard Leacock and DA Pennebaker — the great cinéma vérité documentary filmmakers who filmed life as it was happening in front of them. For seven years, I made cinéma vérité films. I was deeply influenced by that style of trying to make fiction that has the extraordinariness, the electricity, and the surprise of real life.

So the camera in Monsoon Wedding was designed to be like a character in the story. Declan Quinn was the film’s cinematographer. Our first film together was Kama Sutra in 1994, and we have now worked together for about 30 years. He is the master of the handheld camera, and a poet of light. We had a very small budget. The whole premise of the Dogme method and Monsoon Wedding was to not require big budgets. Moreover, it was a complicated plotline to do in very little time. The idea was to make this film in 30 days. We did it by having acting workshops for two-three weeks before we started shooting.

We also moved into this home — the set — my friend Chanda Singh’s house, and blocked the film with our actors, often 21 at a time. By blocking I mean, we choreographed where people would be, stand, and where they would walk in — we did all the things that take time to set up on shoot, a week prior to the shooting of the film so when we were shooting, we were flying. We were shooting eight to 10 pages a day. But at the same time, ensuring not to reduce the visual interest of the shots because we had pre-planned them and choreographed them, and used every moment to highlight our story. Since our story is quite complicated, and a lot is said without saying, it had to be designed in a way that it landed.

Still from Monsoon Wedding

Of the five shades of love that the film explores, which one is the closest to your heart?

I had several ideas that I brought to the table. One of them was the different notions of love. We talked about it as five kinds of love. Our marriages are often arranged marriages, and in Punjabi weddings, a lot of material splendour is exhibited. It’s all about spending money to show your place in the community, and have fun with it. I wanted to contrast it with non-material love, where you have nothing much except your heart and intention. And that’s beautiful.

That became the upstairs and the downstairs version of Monsoon Wedding. The Verma family is the upstairs — the upper-middle-class bourgeois family whose daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) is getting married to a guy from America. But the love between the tent wala PK Dube (Vijay Raaz) and the maid of the household Alice (Tillotoma Shome) is the non-material love over a genda phool.

There were also other kinds of love. When we gather for our weddings, there’s not only naach, gaana, and  tamasha, but several secrets are also often revealed. The terrible secret that was never talked about, and was imprisoned by silence, was the sexual incest and abuse by an older uncle of an orphaned niece in the family. So there was that kind of sick, twisted — if you could call it — love.

And then there was the love of the first kiss, the first time as a teenager when you express it. The fifth love was my favourite love, what I call the old-shoe love. It’s the love between husband and wife who have been married for 20-30 years, and have begun to take each other for granted. Like old shoes, it is very comfortable, but you forget that the other person has a beating heart that needs you. How do you rekindle, if at all, the kind of love you once shared but no longer demonstrate in any way?

Still from Monsoon Wedding

It has been two years since your last project A Suitable Boy. What is next?

Monsoon Wedding has not left me for a moment. I am currently making a Broadway-bound stage musical of Monsoon Wedding, which is going to open in Doha, Qatar, during the FIFA World Cup in November 2022. It will then open in London in June 2023, following which we will hopefully go to New York, and bring it to India.

I have been developing and directing the stage musical for the last 12 years. Its music and 21 extraordinary songs are by Vishal Bhardwaj. The book is written by Sabrina Dhawan and Arpita Mukherjee, and the cast is from all over the world — Indian-Americans who took us years to find. We staged 100 shows in Berkley, California, in 2016, after which we were set to open but COVID had stopped us. But we are back, and hoping to make a big splash in the world at the end of this year and next year.

On the film front, I’m going to be directing and producing The Jungle Prince of Delhi, an extraordinary story of the last living descendants of the Mughals, that Ellen Barry wrote about in The New York Times in 2019. The article is about a family who parked themselves at the New Delhi railway station for 10 years, claiming that they were the descendants of the Mughal kings. It’s an enormous epic on displacement, trauma, partition, imposters, and identity. We’re set to shoot in early 2023.

Additionally, I’m also preparing a musical feature film between America and India with music by Pharrell Williams. It’s a black-brown romance with a lot of music and Bollywood. We will be entering production by the end of 2022.

I’ve also just completed directing the pilot hour of National Treasure, a Disney+ series based on the iconic National Treasure movies starring Nicholas Cage. In this spin-off, we have Harvey Keitel, Katherine Zeta-Jones, and a brilliant new 21-year-old Mexican actor Lisette Alexis as the protagonist — a girl whose mind unlocks clues that eventually lead her to a national treasure. This should be out in August 2022 on Disney+.

JLF Soneva Fushi is a 10-day bespoke festival slated to be held in the Maldives from 13-22 May 2022. Other than Mira Nair, its line-up includes several giants from the worlds of art, music, and literature.

When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites.

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