Mira Nair: From Vanity Fair to the Namesake

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.