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The Democratic pick for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, once advised his mother, director Mira Nair, not to work on the Harry Potter film series.
Nair is an Indian-American filmmaker, best known for the 1991 movie Mississippi Masala and 2001’s Monsoon Wedding. She once revealed that during her career, she was given the opportunity to direct Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, which came out in 2007.
During an interview at the 2018 Jaipur Literature Festival, she said Warner Bros. approached her to work on that movie after they saw her 2004 film Vanity Fair starring Reese Witherspoon.
“I was deep into making The Namesake at the time,” she said, referring to her 2006 film, which was based on the Jhumpa Lahiri novel of the same name. Nair was also working on The Namesake after the unexpected death of her mother-in-law, who was like a mother to her.
“I was deep in that melancholy,” she continued. “That’s what inspired me to make The Namesake because Jhumpa had written in it of this terrible melancholy of losing a parent in a foreign country, which is exactly what I was experiencing.”
She explained that she was just a month away from filming The Namesake when Warner Bros. reached out to her. Nair said she felt compelled to attend the meetings with the studio because her son had learned to read through J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
However, she didn’t want to give up on working on her own film, so she asked her then-14-year-old son what to do.
“He said to me, ‘Mamma, many good directors can make Harry Potter, but only you can make The Namesake,’” Nair recalled. “And it was such a liberating and clarifying statement, and it kind of is about how I lived my life. Like, what can I do that is so specific that you cannot do? How to make my distinctiveness my calling card.”
This philosophy has guided Nair throughout her career, including during the production of 1991’s Mississippi Masala. During a 2022 interview with Slate, she reflected on the challenges of making the drama, which features an interracial romance between Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury.
“I had already got Denzel to say yes. He loved Salaam Bombay! and that was the reason he wanted to meet me,” she recalled. “I pitched the story, and the head of the studio says to me, ‘Can you make room for a white protagonist?’”
“And I said, ‘I can promise you one thing, that all the waiters in this film will be white,’” she added. “And he kind of looked at me and laughed, and I laughed, and he politely showed me the door.”
However, she went on to work with a different studio to create her movie with Choudhury and Washington. And she said that “the novelty of seeing Black and brown skin in the one frame” was “a big thing.”
Democrat Zohran Mamdani celebrated a stunning victory in Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary, after former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s concession.
The assemblyman first began serving in the 36th Assembly District in 2021, representing the Astoria, Astoria Heights, and Ditmars-Steinway neighborhoods in Queens. Now, he’s set to take his campaign to the next level as he looks to become New York City’s next mayor this November.
