Mira Nair People Quotations

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

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.

New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.

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.'

People ask me this, but I've never sought to be on an A-list. I've done my own thing and my own thing has thankfully now brought me an audience.

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.

I guess that would be Indian, in a way. We are used to no privacy. We are used to a lot of people in a room, sleeping on mattresses.

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 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.

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.