Indian-born director Mira Nair became fascinated with Amelia Earhart

Growing up in India, Mira Nair didn't know much about pioneering American aviator and Atchison, Kan., native Amelia Earhart.
"For me, she was a person on a postage stamp," the filmmaker said in a phone call from her New York production office. "That was it.
"Of course I learned about her when I came to this country to study. But I only really began to understand her in an emotional way when I was hired to make this movie about her. Then I looked at all the newsreel footage, and that's what really got me hooked."
What she saw, Nair said, was a woman who kept her eyes on what excited her: flying.
"And though she was living in the public eye - always getting medals and climbing in and out of airplanes while camera crews recorded it - there was a consistent humility about her.
"Humility, you know, is not a particularly American sensibility. But here was this woman who had enough madness to dream big, to achieve her goals systematically, but also to achieve them with humility and to go through life with a kind of grace."
Nair said she hoped she captured some of Earhart's spirit in "Amelia," the biographical film starring Hilary Swank that opens Friday.
"Amelia" is her first film about a real historic person, and she found it particularly challenging.
"I must say it was my most difficult film. I wanted it to reflect Amelia's epic story. It's daunting to make a biography of an iconic person in a flesh-and-blood way. In Amelia's case, she's very elusive, and it was hard to capture that enigma and her non-hysterical sense of cool."
Earhart's many accomplishments so popularized flying that she was a major force in the establishment of commercial aviation, Nair said.
22/20/09 Robert W Butler/McClatchy Newspapers/KansasCity.com

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Categories: Foreign Oct 2009