'Queen of Katwe' Director Mira Nair on the Drama of Chess, Capturing Uganda on Film, and Mentoring a Young Lupita Nyong'o
By Carrie Rickey
Queen of Katwe director Mira Nair is the most cosmopolitan of international filmmakers. Born in India and educated in the United States, she is at home on three continents, maintaining residences in New York City, New Delhi, and Kampala, Uganda. She has made movies in each city: The Namesake was shot in New York and Calcutta, Monsoon Wedding in New Delhi, and Queen of Katwe, her latest movie in theaters now, in Kampala.
Nair, an earthy brunette with a musical voice, knows that the most local story is the most universal. It would be hard to get more geographically specific than Katwe, which was shot on the muddy roads of the cramped Kampala slum in a valley 15 minutes from the hillside summer home she shares with husband Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University.
Resplendent in a pea-green jacket and golden jodphurs, Nair answered questions about Queen of Katwe before she screened it for the Directors Guild of America last week in Manhattan. The movie is the story of the real-life Phiona Mutesi, the illiterate daughter of Harriet (Lupita Nyong’o), a vegetable vendor raising four children alone in the slum called Katwe. When missionary Robert Katende (the charismatic David Oyelowo) recruits 9-year-old Phiona (Madina Nalwanga) to join a chess club, her narrow world expands beyond the boundaries of neighborhood, nation, and imagination.
YAHOO: You have a home in Kampala, where you shot sequences of Mississippi Masala and where you run Maisha, a film lab. Were you looking to shoot a feature there?
MIRA NAIR: The film-school mantra is that if you don’t tell your own stories, nobody will. The irony here is that for 27 years, I’ve been looking to make a movie in Kampala, and this one came, of all places, by way of Disney. Tendo Nagenda, a Disney executive whose father is Ugandan, approached me with the project. With this movie, I got to show what I know and love about Kampala, from the fisherman at the edge of Lake Victoria to the colors of Katwe.
There is a recurring motif in your films, that of a character emerging from a tunnel of no choices into a panorama of possibilities. For Phiona in Katwe, learning chess leads to learning how to read and traveling to international competitions. Growing up, did you experience a similar emergence?
For me, books were the first opening of the tunnel. I lived in Orissa [now Orisha], south of Calcutta, a place with 2,000-year-old temples, red dirt roads, and wild grasses, and learned from books that the world was big and mine was small.
Talk about your role in the emergence of Lupita Nyong’o, the Kenyan actress and an Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave, who stars in Katwe.
The first time I met my husband, Mahmood, he was with Peter Nyong’o, Lupita’s father. Over the years the Nyong’os have become family. Lupita came to work with me as an intern. Then she went to Yale — and became a star. She has fire and style. I exposed her to the world of film through Maisha, my film lab in Kampala. Working with her was like working with a daughter who knows her own future.
Because so many of your films are about characters that transition from where they are to other, unimaginable places, it’s tempting to see an autobiographical thread in your filmography. Planes and cultural displacement are major elements in Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, and, of course, your Amelia Earhart biopic, Amelia. Likewise in Katwe, where Phiona has culture shock when she flies to Russia for a tournament. Do these echo the experience of the 20-year-old Mira Nair who flies away from India to study at Harvard?
My movies are not consciously autobiographical, but it is true that I know what it is like to feel like an outsider. Like Phiona feels when she first enters the chess club and no one wants her there. I’m inspired by people that are marginal. I’m excited by their resilience.
From your first feature, Salaam Bombay, you have worked with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors. In Katwe, Phiona is played by Madina Nalwanga, a quiet, self-contained young woman who had never before acted. How do you get a nonprofessional to behave naturally in front of the camera?
[Laughs] How? Any which way! The essence is in casting. Instead of auditioning, the kids in Katwe took part in workshops. I ask the kids to do scenes not in the movie. Over time, you see who they are, what their particularities are. You see who emerges as a lead character.
Is it a challenge to match the scenes with the professionals and the civilians?
The nonprofessional’s lack of artifice lifts the bar for the professional and makes the professional drop any schtick.
While your movies are in part about how race and class divide people, you’re equally interested in the way passion and love unite them. And while they are also about how poverty crushes the soul, they are also about how people transcend privation. Where does this optimism come from?
Optimism? I’m not interested in passion and love for their own sake — without the struggle of life they’re just fluff. And poverty: I have to show how it limits possibilities. As Phiona reminds us, “How can you be a chess player if you don’t have a roof over your head and the driving rains could drown your baby brother?” Is it resilience or optimism?
I think optimism springs from nature. I’m a gardener. Nature has taught me about rhythm, the essence of every art. With so much that is terrible, nature gives me pleasure.
ESPN is involved as a coproducer of Katwe. Is chess a sport, a language, or a way of conceptualizing power?
Chess was invented in India as a war game around the 7th century. It’s very detailed. It makes you think strategically, sometimes as many as eight moves ahead. Filming it is very challenging. To answer the question, I’ll tell you what the real-life Phiona told me: “It does two important things. It harnesses the mind. And it teaches you to consider the other side of the board.”
What does your global perspective give you? What are the benefits of knowing and living and working in so many different cultures? Or considering the other side of the board, as Phiona might say?
The more expansive my world view, the more I realize that people are much the same. All parents want their children to be healthy and to get educated. I take you to other worlds — but you always recognize yourself.
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Essential Mira Nair movies
Salaam Bombay! (1988) Nair’s first feature, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, follows a village boy abandoned by the circus where he works. He makes his way to India’s largest city and lives in the red-light district, bound in a complex web of exploitation by and with his new “family.” A compassionate and eloquent portrait of an inarticulate youth.
Mississippi Masala (1992) Booted from their homeland, Asian Indians from Uganda emigrate to the American South. When their daughter (Sarita Choudhury) gets in a fender-bender with a contractor (Denzel Washington), this two-generation story of ethnic and romantic collisions takes off.
Monsoon Wedding (2002) An arranged marriage in New Delhi bring together all the members of two clans who are exactly like your family — only funnier and with more secrets.
The Namesake (2007) Newlyweds from Calcutta emigrate to the United States, where they live in between two cultures. Their all-American son (Kal Penn) evolves from rejecting his parents and their heritage to embracing them in Nair’s most deeply affecting film.
