How did Denzel Washington become involved?
I really always wanted Denzel, who was not a star at the time. He had just made one film at that time, which I had seen called “For Queen and Country.” He loved my first film, which was “Salaam Bombay!,” so he agreed to meet me. When I was telling him the story, he said no one’s going to offer him an Asian-African American story like this. Actors when they like a film they like it also because they can trust the director. I think that’s what happened with “Salaam Bombay!”, but I’m not sure, but I know he really liked it. I always tell people when I teach film, or if I talk to students, that you have no idea where good work, or bad work, will lead you. If I’ve seen your work, that’s the best calling card you have. You never know when it will come back up again in any context. That’s what happened with Denzel. It was only while we were shooting our film that he became a star like he became with an Oscar nomination for “Cry Freedom” and all of that. I have a good eye, I just knew he was going to be a mega star. Sarita too, but the world is slower for people like us.
I was always surprised that she wasn’t a bigger star because she’s in so many great films in the ’90s. And she’s obviously gorgeous. It really shows the double standard when someone that gorgeous and that talented is just now sort of breaking out for a broader audience.
Yeah, exactly. People are waking up and finally smelling the roses.
How did you come to set the dynamic of this film between South Asian immigrants and Black Americans?
The story was born out of several things. Initially, the genesis of the story for me, before I talked to Sooni Taraporevala about writing it, was being a brown kid between Black and white at Harvard, where I came to college for the first time leaving India when I was 18. I wanted to tell some story about what I call the hierarchy of color and being in between. I looked for situations in the world to hang my hat on and found it in the Asian exile from Uganda to Mississippi and also this remarkable thing that was happening where Indians were owning all the motels in this city. So I thought what if these two communities as they already are get together, and someone crosses the border. What was interesting to me was the commonality. These were Ugandan Indians, who had never known India, who had only known Africa as home, coming to Mississippi, which was the birthplace of the civil rights movement, and in an African American community of people who had never known Africa as home. What if somebody challenges that border and crosses the border with love. That was one premise.
We interviewed 2,000 Ugandan Asian exiles. I personally went to Mississippi and asked Sooni to join me after my first trip. We drove around and lived in motels and met so many characters. We actually had a car collision, just like in the movie, and other things happened that informed our story. Then we realized that we’d never actually been to the African continent. We’d never been to this place, which was a dream for these exiles in Uganda. So we decided to go there. It changed my life forever. Because when I went there, I met this man whose book I had read about the expulsion, and who is now my husband of 32 years. That is our home in Uganda, and that’s where our son was born. We have layers of history, and the film school and everything, right there, all these years later. In retrospect, that totally changed my life. I was nominated for the Oscar for my first film “Salaam Bombay!”. I was supposed to be heading to Los Angeles, not to war-torn Uganda where I didn’t have a telephone for three years. That’s life. It was really like that. But it’s a beautiful life. A rich life.