Filmmaker Mira Nair says she decided to adapt Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid's novel 'Reluctant Fundamentalist', about post 9/11 world, for her son who is growing up and looking for a place to call home.
The director, who has successfully in the past made movies on books like 'Vanity Fair' and 'The Namesake', says her latest film was also inspired by her trip to Lahore in 2005.
Hamid's book depicts the story of Pakistani-American Changez, a young man chasing corporate success on the Wall Street. But his world is changed post September 2011 tragedy in America where he finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his homeland.
"I made this movie for my son, who is turning 21 and is looking for a place to call home. Post 9/11 so much has changed in New York that it does not give you that homely feeling which it did before. I wanted to make this story for him to lift the illusion that grass is greener on the other side. I wanted to show both the side intelligently," Nair said during the Penguin Books India Spring Fever festival here.
The 55-year-old director says her film, starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber and Bollywood veterans like Om Puri and Shabana Azmi, also tries to present a contemporary Pakistan which is something more than what newspaper headlines say.
"My inspiration to make the movie came when I first visited Lahore in 2005. It was a fantastically moving experience and I wanted to make a contemporary take on Pakistan, which we never hear. All we read about Pakistan in the newspapers are the drones, the be-headings, assassinations.
"May be that is true but the heart beat is never there. I read Mohsin's book and craved to make that dialogue between America. I know these both worlds and we have never heard our side of the story but only America's.
