Arts & Entertainment
Telling the Story: Monsoon Wedding
Lesson time 21:07 min
For Mira, Monsoon Wedding was a chance to experiment with telling a story inspired by her upbringing. Learn how to balance emotions in a story to bring out the universal truths and connect your story with a larger audience.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Balancing Joy and Sorrow • Every Scene Has to Have Three Dimensionality • Finding an Audience
Preview
I've always believed that the more specifically local and truthful to the local that you make your world and your characters, it becomes surprisingly universal. Take "Monsoon Wedding," for instance, you know? We conceived of this film as an experiment, you know, as really kind of, for me, inspired by dogma, the whole method in Denmark of how to make an interesting film without millions of dollars and men in suits and, you know, how to make an inventive story pretty much based on not much money. And "Monsoon Wedding" was born out of a desire to make an experimental film, to make a film back on the low budget that I had started on several years before, when I had the strength in me and the rigor in me to go back into a $1 million zone of, you know, how I had begun. And I met a wonderful-- I was teaching film at Columbia University at the time, and the smartest woman in my class was a young woman from Delhi, my home city, Sabrina Dhawan. And we began talking about how to make a film that could be, in its heart, a populist film, a film almost offbeat inspired by the current Hindi movie at the time, "Hum Aapke Hain Koun," which was a massive wedding movie, Bollywood style, 21 songs. My whole family and I went to see it like hundreds of Indian families and enjoyed it, you know? And I said to Sabrina, what about making a reality check film of what a real wedding is like, you know-- a Punjabi wedding, the wedding our communities come from, you know? And I mean, at its heart, I did want to make, I hoped, a popular film, but I also wanted to make it experimentally and visually inventively and, again, go into zones which never have been gone into, you know. And "Monsoon Wedding" was inspired also by what us Punjabis-- you know, we are North Indians. We work very hard, but we party even harder. We are the party animals of India. And there is something we do in our weddings especially, but otherwise as well, is that we have masti, which "masti" is a Hindi word which means kind of an intoxication with life. And I wanted to see if I could do that, but in a real way as opposed to a Bollywood way. But in the heart of every family, there are secrets, and there is drama, and especially during a wedding when it all breaks out, you know? And as Sabrina and I, you know, riffed about the story and what it could be, because there are several ideas. The story is-- for me, it was so much about making a story about different kinds of love, you know, of what I called old shoe love, a love of a father and a mother of the bride who had been married 30 years, and although they loved each other, had the passion gone. You know, was there a spark anymore? And that was the love I saw a lot around me, and I wanted to actually pay homage to that love, because it is deep. It's just that it's sometimes neglectful, you know? And then first love, the love of a first kiss, falling in lust, in a sense, you know, and then the love which I thought the arranged marria...
About the Instructor
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair approaches directing with the “heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant,” spurred by rejection and fighting to bring uncompromising stories to film. In the Golden Lion-winning director’s MasterClass, learn to make a big impact on a small budget in film production, evoke the best from actors and nonactors, and protect your creative vision so you tell the story that can only come from you.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Mira Nair
The Oscar-nominated director teaches her methods for directing powerful performances, maximizing budgets, and bringing authentic stories to life.
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