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| MIRA NAIR’S next film will be the biggest she has ever tackled, with Johnny Depp as the lead and a budget of about $100 million. The film, “Shantaram,” which she has just agreed to direct for Warner Brothers, is based on Gregory David Roberts’s autobiographical novel about an Australian robber and drug addict who escapes from prison and reinvents himself by starting a medical clinic in the slums of Bombay. Beneath its starry high profile, though, “Shantaram” engages issues that have obsessed Ms. Nair throughout her career. For immigrants and their children, what is home? What is family? How do you forge a new cultural identity? “He is a man who disappears into the fabric of another place,” Ms. Nair said about the Depp character in a recent conversation. Explaining the lure of the novel, she added: “The theme I’m most interested in is, can a foreigner be a native? I’m interested in the seesaw of it, because I’m not sure that in the deepest way that’s possible. Ultimately you have to understand where you came from. Otherwise you’re lost.” |
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| But it is “Shantaram,” the future project, that makes Ms. Nair sound even more engaged than usual. “There’s something about Johnny Depp that embodies that fluidity between East and West,” she said. His character grapples with issues central to her own past and to her life today, with her husband, their 15-year-old son, Zohran, and their sense of home spread over several countries. With a freshness and timeliness few directors match, her films reflect that multifaceted cultural identity, a fusion that is both distinctly hers and emblematic of the way American identity itself is changing. “The fact that families are so fluid today, it’s like ‘Monsoon Wedding,’ ” she said. “Fluidity, that is my anchor.” |