I had a very fortunate opportunity to speak with Amelia (and Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!, & Mississippi Masala) director Mira Nair last week. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, and we touched on Amelia toward the beginning but moved to other topics she hadn't been asked about seventy times. This was in the interest of both getting into what she's working on next and to make this piece worth your precious time.
I feel that people went into Amelia with heavily loaded expectations as to what type of movie it was going to (or should) be and what tempo it would bop along at. The lovey-dovey art that took over the ad campaign didn't help this. This certainly isn't the first time a movie has been pitched to the masses as a sweeping "dip me and kiss me, you big strong man!" romance when it isn't. I much prefer the art that shows her looking out in the wild blue. That's what this movie is about. The following interview is culled from my copious notes since the audio file became corrupted and unusable.
I started off by introducing myself and telling Mira how fond of her films I've been since seeing Monsoon Wedding in college. I then asked her about what surprised her most in the research phase, since the subject seemed to play so naturally into her anthropological style of storytelling and sensibilities as a documentarian. She said, "After watching 16 hours of newsreels, and feeling this great sense of humility (which is not a typical American trait), I wanted to be part of telling this story. I wanted the audience to feel her curiosity...her passion and even recklessness. I wanted Amelia to be something different than what people expect from a biographical movie. I wanted people to feel like they were right there with her in the cockpit."
I asked if there were any particular historical figures that she looked up to as a child. She said, "Not in particular, really. I read a lot of biographies and was very idealistic. I found myself constantly asking, 'Can art change the world?' and questioning what was expected." I then used the opportunity to ask about a film I've rarely seen her asked about in interviews, The Perez Family.
The story is about three unrelated Cuban immigrants with the same last name who came over on the Mariel Boatlift. They register with immigration as a family to improve their chances of staying in the country. My father came over on the Boatlift, and I told her as much. I asked what drew her to that story, and whether it had to do with cultural parallels she felt between Indians and Latinos. She said, "You know, Cubans and Punjabis have a similar way of dealing with life in a tragicomic way. Both of our cultures have this appetite for living in spite of adversity, so yes, I felt very much at home."
We only had a few minutes left, so I asked what she was in the process of putting together, and I got a timetable for both of her upcoming projects, "Well, I'm talking to you from New Delhi, where I have been preparing my next film. We will be shooting in New York, Lahore, and Chile. It's an adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. We're looking for a young man in his early twenties for the lead. It's an excellent book, and we will be shooting in September. Before that, we're taking Monsoon Wedding to Broadway in June to do a workshop, so both should be happening somewhat simultaneously in 2011."
Since it seemed I'd bought myself another couple of minutes, I asked what it was like working with The Criterion Collection on their recent special edition of Monsoon Wedding (reviewed here, and now $23.99 at Amazon). She said, "They really are God's gift to cinema, aren't they? To be a part of the Collection is truly one of the greatest honors. And wasn't it just gorgeous, the packaging? It took three years to put it together in the way that I really wanted to, with the introductions and everything."
I told her my favorite part, loving the short films as I do, was the retrospective interview she did with Naseeruddin Shah. She said, "Wasn't that wonderful? There were so many things he said that he had never told me about! That story about growing up, watching those movies, it was just remarkable."
Our time was up, we said our goodbyes, and as a true indication of her person, she asked me to give her regards to my father. I can assure you that her generosity as an interview subject didn't compromise my view of the movie we were supposed to be talking about. Amelia the movie is as rare a bird as the person it's about. It's not some generic thrill-ride, but rather, a poetic elegy to a unique spirit.
Plenty of people wanted it to go the way of adding some non-truth to spice up her story. That way, it would seem exciting to our easily-bored, impatient society. Prosecuting Nair for directing a movie about someone with an "unspicy" life by modern standards is simply ridiculous and smacks of opportunism. The movie is a meditation, not an "action-packed thrill ride".
Amelia hit DVD & Blu-ray last week, with identical extras on both editions. They include ten deleted scenes, four featurettes (Making Amelia, The Power of Amelia Earhart, The Plane Behind the Legend, Re-Constructing the Planes of Amelia), and a pile of Movietone newsreels. Amazon has the DVD at $17.99 and the Blu-ray for $24.99.