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" With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story. "

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" The film itself should interact with the audience. In the case of 'Queen of Katwe', people are laughing, sobbing and dancing. I am taking them on a ride... It is not like I am asking them for handouts. "

Mira Nair

Queen

Ride

Dancing

" Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named. "

" It's only at this age that I can say the word 'art' without flinching. "

" No one goes to Pakistan to make movies. You stick out. "

" My close friends call me the bulldozer who never says no. I have never not made a film. "

" It is shocking that the screen does not reflect the way the world is and the diversity in the world... What the world really looks like should be on screen, and it isn't. "

" When people break up, after sharing their entire souls with each other, I don't want to believe that you just switch off. There are remnants of melancholia, and there is so much that stays with you because you loved this person. Of course, it's that much more complicated when it's an interracial love or love from a person from another culture. "

" We have three generations at home, including my father-in-law. I keep a very low profile, and a lot of things I do are very much with the family in mind. I have actually made films with the family around me. "

" Every frame and every scene has to have an intention. "

" Post 9/11, so much has changed in New York that it does not give you that homely feeling which it did before. "

" 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've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla. "

" It took me three years to learn to dress in the American way, especially in winter. That was just like me. I barely wear socks even now. "

" 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.' "

" Bollywood actors are so set in what they want, and the way they want it. And why shouldn't they be? But it is not the same in Hollywood, because the love of the audience is not the same. "

" We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism. "

" Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant. "

" 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. "

Mira Nair

Nature

Art

" There's nothing universal about Indian families except that the family itself is deeply important across the country. It's sort of the fabric and anchor of our country. "

" 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. "

" The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will. "

" I think in the last thirty years, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. It is not something that you can see with rose-colored glasses. "

" I dream of living off the land completely - in vain, because the monkeys eat everything. "

" We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing. "

" The dignity of everyday life - the beauty of it, the attitude of it - is what I live around. And it is never on screen, and it is certainly never associated with Africa. If we see Africa at all, it is always used as a backdrop: a big blob of a continent rather than a specific street or a country or a place. "

" I'm inspired by people that are marginal. I'm excited by their resilience. "

" I often begin movies with music in my head; it's a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don't like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures. "

Mira Nair

Sweet

Music

" Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side. "

" From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed. "

" I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis. "