Top 55 Mira Nair Quotes

I often begin movies with music in my head; it’s a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don’t like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures.

They say now in America that final cut doesn’t mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, ‘You can have final cut. I’ll open your film in Arkansas.’

It’s only at this age that I can say the word ‘art’ without flinching.

I am Indian, and my home is Kampala. My world is already diverse. But films are financed by those who want to see themselves on screen, and it is a white male world. Still, it does feel like America is waking up. Let’s hope it’s the start of an avalanche.

I want to question what the outside is and who defines it. I often find those that are considered to be on the outside extremely inspiring.

We want the diversity of the world that is around us represented both in front of and behind the camera, and on our screens as a result.

I dream of living off the land completely – in vain, because the monkeys eat everything.

You know, the sad thing of post-9/11, which was of course horrific, was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades, suddenly people like us – brown people – were looked at as the ‘Others.’

I think films have to reach people and really grab them. That’s what I hope to do when I make a film – to get under your skin and really make you think about something, and have a transporting time that takes you somewhere.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.

There’s nothing universal about Indian families except that the family itself is deeply important across the country. It’s sort of the fabric and anchor of our country.

Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I’ve seen, what I know – they’re not all screaming faceless mullahs. It’s disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.

We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.

I’m the bullheaded type, and I really don’t give up if I fall in love.

I love the idea that it doesn’t take one person only to achieve your potential. It takes a village, it takes a community, a street, a teacher, a mother.

I’m inspired by people that are marginal. I’m excited by their resilience.

I know what it’s like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it’s like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.

Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.

My family is almost exactly like the one in ‘Monsoon Wedding’. We are very open, fairly liberal, loud people.

We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing.

I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work.

Christmas lights may be the loneliest thing for me, especially if you mix them up with reindeers and sleighs. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel I do not belong.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

I look for the humanity in people, however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be, whether it’s subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves.

The film-school mantra is that if you don’t tell your own stories, nobody will.

What’s nice about what we have is when you enter the set, the world of film, it becomes this real cocoon, very different from all the publicity. That’s the fun part.

In our house we say ‘adolescence’ is a western word. We don’t believe in it.

I don’t think boldness should be associated with showing off skin. It’s not the basis of boldness.

A lot of us feel that we are against the war; we are against profiling and are against what is happening. We are tired of war in every manifestation. American people do not all believe in what the government has been doing.

I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the world.

I listen to music deeply and seriously for at least an hour or two a day.

Bollywood actors are so set in what they want, and the way they want it. And why shouldn’t they be? But it is not the same in Hollywood, because the love of the audience is not the same.

I am at home in many cultures. I live actively in three continents and I’ve done that for most of my life, so I just make films as I see the world, and that happens to speak to people. I do things that I want to do.

We all know the power of film; we all know there’s almost nothing more powerful than to see people on film that look and talk like you, like we do.

I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.

I am actually a resident of three worlds – of America, of India, and of Africa. I live in Uganda most of the year. It’s extraordinary to have that worldview that is an expansive one rather than just looking at the world from where you sit.

Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it’s not highly unusual.

India somehow constantly rivets and inspires me, and I feel very relieved to have come from this country which has a very ‘lifeist’ approach to living fully, no matter what one has or doesn’t have.

As the director of a film, as the story teller, you have to keep your voice alive.

You’ve got to understand that in Bollywood, every actor is an instrument, and yet a human being. They come to the set with a set agenda, believing, ‘This is who I am, this is what I want, and no, I am not going to become that character you want me to.’

Truth is much stranger than fiction and, often, much more powerful.

We have three generations at home, including my father-in-law. I keep a very low profile, and a lot of things I do are very much with the family in mind. I have actually made films with the family around me.

‘No words – action’ was the lesson my mother taught me: as artists, we have the privilege of holding a mirror to the world, to engage, to question, to bring beauty to a complex universe.

I’m not interested in passion and love for their own sake – without the struggle of life, they’re just fluff.

I grew up in a small town in India, but through books I knew the world.

My family is vital to me – just the sense of being surrounded by no pretension.

Katwe is fifteen minutes from my home. It’s entirely about knowing it from the inside. For instance, the incredible vibrancy of style. Kampala is the center of used clothing in the world. Everyone dresses in secondhand clothes, but they look astonishing for it.

My close friends call me the bulldozer who never says no. I have never not made a film.

I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories.

I think, in terms of activism associated with my films, be it ‘Salaam Baalak Trust’ or ‘Maisha,’ taking the idea of cinema as a way to change people, I feel heartened. I am glad that we have impacted thousands of lives.

I don’t want to say that we are the world in that we are not distinct from each other. I want to say that the humanity that is our foundation is common, but my culture, my beliefs, my values, what makes me sing and what makes me happy and the language I speak in and the relationships I have in the world are distinctive.

Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that.

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it’s not a conversation, it’s a monologue. It’s always from one point of view. ‘If we don’t tell our own stories, no one will tell them’ is my mantra.

It gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 percent of the crew for ‘Monsoon Wedding,’ and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego… And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of egolessness and that the film is bigger than all of us.