Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneswar, India in 1957. Educated at both Delhi University and Harvard University, Nair began her artistic career as an actor before turning her attention to film. She found incipient success as a documentary filmmaker, winning awards for So Far From India and India Cabaret. In 1988, Nair’s debut feature, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It also won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival as well as 25 other international awards.  

Nair’s next film, Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the American South and Uganda, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival including Best Screenplay and The Audience Choice Award.  Subsequent films include The Perez Family (with Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Chazz Palminteri), about an exiled Cuban family in Miami; and the sensuous Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which she directed and co-wrote.

Nair directed My Own Country based on Dr. Abraham Verghese's best-selling memoir about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Made in 1998, My Own Country starred Naveen Andrews, Glenne Headly, Marisa Tomei, Swoosie Kurtz, and Hal Holbrook, and was awarded the NAACP award for best fiction feature.

Nair returned to the documentary form in August 1999 with The Laughing Club of India, which was awarded The Special Jury Prize in the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels 2000.

In the summer of 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding in 30 days, a story of a Punjabi wedding starring Naseeruddin Shah and an ensemble of Indian actors. The film opened to tremendous critical acclaim and commercial success and went on to win the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and receive Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Foreign Language Film.

Nair’s next film, Hysterical Blindness, gave HBO its highest original film ratings in three years. Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film stars Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis, Gena Rowlands, and Ben Gazarra. Over 15 million viewers watched Blindness on HBO and critics recognized the film with a Golden Globe for Uma Thurman and three Emmy Awards (including Best Supporting Actress for Rowlands and Best Supporting Actor for Gazarra).

Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Nair joined a group of 11 renowned filmmakers, each commissioned to direct a film that was 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame long. Nair’s film is a retelling of real events in the life of the Hamdani family in Queens, whose eldest son was missing after September 11, and was then accused by the media of being a terrorist. 11.09.01 is the true story of a mother's search for her son who did not return home on that fateful day.

In 2003, Nair produced “Still the Children Are Here,” an intimate documentary by Dinaz Stafford about the Garo peoples of Meghalaya, India.

In May 2003, Nair directed the Focus Features production of the William Thackeray classic, Vanity Fair, a provocative period tale set in Georgian England, filmed entirely on location in the UK and India. Reese Witherspoon stars as Becky Sharp, a woman who defies her poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder; Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins, Eileen Atkins, Gabriel Byrne, and Rhys Ifans round up the stellar ensemble cast.

Nair was appointed as the mentor in film by the prestigious Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, joining fellow mentors Jessye Norman, Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Saburo Teshigawara to help guide young artists in critical stages of their development.

Nair is slated to produce and direct several projects in the next year, including Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (currently in post-production) and a Hollywood remake of the Bollywood blockbuster, Munnabhai, MBBS. In addition, Mirabai Films has established an annual filmmaker’s laboratory, Maisha, which is dedicated to the support of visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. The first lab, which will focus on screenwriting, was launched in August 2005 in Kampala, Uganda.

Nair currently lives in New York City with her husband and son.

MIRA NAIR - FILMOGRAPHY

JAMA MASJID STREET JOURNAL, 1979.
Documentary, 18 minutes, 16 mm.

SO FAR FROM INDIA, 1983
Documentary, 52 minutes, 16 mm.

INDIA CABARET, 1985.
Documentary, 58 minutes, 16 mm.

CHILDREN OF A DESIRED S**, 1987
Documentary, 30 minutes, 16 mm.

SALAAM BOMBAY!, 1988.
Fiction, 113 minutes, 35 mm.

MISSISSIPI MASALA, 1991.
Fiction, 113 minutes, 35 mm.

THE PEREZ FAMILY, 1993.
Fiction, 106 minutes, 35 mm.

THE DAY THE MERCEDES BECAME A HAT, 1993.
Fiction, 10 minutes, 35 mm.

KAMA SUTRA: A TALE OF LOVE, 1996.
Fiction, 112 minutes, 35 mm.

MY OWN COUNTRY, 1998.
Fiction, 100 minutes, 35 mm.

THE LAUGHING CLUB OF INDIA, 1999.
Documentary, 35 minutes, Digital Video.

MONSOON WEDDING, 2001.
Fiction, 113 minutes, 35 mm.

HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS, 2001.
Fiction, 98 minutes, 35 mm.

11.09.01, 2002.
Fiction, 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and one frame, 35 mm.

VANITY FAIR, 2004.
Fiction, 137 minutes, 35 mm

THE NAMESAKE, 2006.

MONSOON WEDDING TAKES INDIA BY STORM

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Mira Nair

One of the most acclaimed directors of our time and the queen of crossover cinema, Mira Nair speaks exclusively to SAAFA about life, films and her new movie "The Namesake".

What inspired you to adapt Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Namesake” to a movie?

I was really inspired by grief. I had just lost my mother in law, who was like a mother to me and that too very unexpectedly in New York, in a malpractise in a Hospital. We buried her in a snowstorm in New Jersey and this was a woman who had spent her whole life in East Africa and I had never before experienced the finality of death of a person close to me. I read the Namesake six weeks into mourning, by chance, on a plane, going to India, at the end of Vanity Fair and I felt such a shock of recognition of how Jhumpa had acutely instilled in what it felt like to bury a parent in a country that was not home. As soon as the plane landed, I called up my agent, the rights were available and a week later I was sitting across Jhumpa in my office in New York, who gave me the rights and nine months later we were shooting this film.

You said that the Namesake is a very personal story; did you have similar experiences when you moved to the US?

Not similar to Ashima, because I came as a student and was part of a larger institution. I did not come as someone else’s wife. But in so many ways having grown up in Calcutta, and then in New York City, I know these cities so very well and I know the state of looking outside your window and seeing instead of the Hudson River, imagining it’s the Ganges. The in-between world of the Ganguli family is very much the state I’m familiar with and so many things about how families are and how life in Calcutta was in the 70’s versus today’s Manhattan. I’m the mother of a fifteen and a half year old and I know what it’s like to raise an adolescent in this country and to feel the push and pull and of course I bring a lot of that into the film.

How do you mange to get into the “soul” of the cities so well. You did that to Bombay in Salaam, then to Delhi in Monsoon Wedding and now to Calcutta and New York in Namesake…how do you manage to so seamlessly, get into these cities?

I have spent formative years of my life in Calcutta. I grew up in Orissa and I used to be shipped to Calcutta for every summer from the age of eight till seventeen. And I also always had this Punjabi part – which is my "whisky-drinking" family from Delhi. But in Calcutta I would be a street activist and an actor in the maidans, which was a complete contrast, and a curious juxtaposition of the Punjabi scene and the intellectual, cultural Bengali side.

This story similarly is in two cities, New York and Cal, which I know like the back of my hand. So when I read the book I knew right away that I wanted to make a love-story about two strangers who fall in love with each other after they are married in a different place and the son, who had to exist in counterpoint to his parents, unlike the book which is much more about Gogol. For me it’s a seesaw, it’s that balancing act between parents and children that I was interested in. To condense thirty hours of the two cities into two hours was by filming the two cities (Cal and NY) like one…. because I really feel the same spirit in the two cities whether it be the bridges, the traffic, the trams or the subway and I mix it up so that the audience too by the middle of it is not sure where they are, because that is how it is to be between worlds, that is how we live.

My background comes from the cinema of the street. I am a humble student of cinema verite so Salaam Bombay is about that, it is about the Bombaiya, what Bombay makes us become and similarly Monsoon Wedding is completely about the chaos of my family dining table and for me it has been fused with images that I love about Delhi, my Delhi is not just that one dining table, it has to be that expansive. I also love the seesaw between comedy and sorrow, you laugh now because you have known sorrow before.

What led you to cast Kal Penn, who at that time was better known for his comic roles?

My fifteen-year-old son worships him! And insisted that I cast Kal, so I was under a lot of domestic pressure! I was shown Kal on the web and I said, fine, he’s a goof, he’s a comic but I’m looking for a dashing young man. Then Kal wrote to me telling me he became an actor because of me. He saw Mississippi Masala when he was eight and realized that people on the screen could look like him. So I said, “fly yourself down and we shall see.” So when he auditioned for me in my office, I saw that he was deeply the real thing. He was like someone who had grown up as Gogol and was born as Gogol, and someone who had negotiated Gogol’s path exactly. He brought a certain kind of hunger and urgency. I’m not someone who is concerned with stereotyping. But yes, it was certainly a lot of pressure from the home-front and I thank him for that because he did such a wonderful job.

What has been your experience as an Indian woman- filmmaker in the mainstream world of Hollywood?

I feel I’ve always done my own thing, right from the beginning. In the beginning it used to be pretty lonesome, I did not know whom I was making films for, even in India, I started with documentaries and I had no audience for them. But I just do what I have to do and keep on doing it and now it actually amazes me that I have a “body of work” and I have an audience. But the thing is, I never sought to be part of the A-list, I never was like “I got to be as good as that guy,” its just…I have to do what I do and in the process of doing that people come to me for my sensibilities. I feel so happy to now direct Shantaram, for instance with actor Johnny Depp…but all this happened because of my work which is authentic and really speaks and also sells a lot of tickets!

Rich legacy of 'Namesake'

Posted: March 29, 2007

Duane Dudek

Everyone, from Aisha to Zack, has a story about his or her name. We inherit our names for a reason - be it biblical, familial or cultural.

And love them or hate them, they become a crucial part of who we are.

"The Namesake" is the story of how Gogol Ganguli received his unwieldy first name, which he changed to the more streamlined Nikhil which became Americanized as Nick, before reverting back to his original name and all it represents, in a process of reinvention that is the human tapestry in microcosm and the immigrant experience in particular

"The reader should realize . . . that to give him any other name was quite out of the question," Nikolai Gogol wrote about the character in his story "The Overcoat," and both the Russian writer and his story run through "The Namesake" like a generations-old secret recipe.

"The Namesake" is a tale of familial love, cultural identity and self-discovery as told through the lives of two Bengali immigrants, gracefully played by Tabu and Irrfan Khan, and their thoroughly Americanized son Gogol, named for the Russian writer with whose work the father feels a special kinship.

"Pack a pillow and blanket and see the world," a character tells the father early in the film. But only after the son, played by Kal Penn, takes his own journey does he come to understand the significance of his name and embrace all that he and it represent to his family.

"The Namesake," by "Monsoon Wedding" director Mira Nair, is adapted from the book by Jhumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize for "Interpreter of Maladies."

Because the film has a lot of ground to cover in a short time, it offers linear, literal and sometimes stilted representations of the book's elegant interior voice. But the effect is to focus the tale in the same way the expectations of Gogol's parents surrender to their assimilated son's sense of the now.

Using the delicate power of the unspoken, Nair artfully creates a world of lyrical specificity where a girl secretly tries her prospective husband's shoes on for size, where snow is seen for the first time through a frosty window by a young bride whose body is still hennaed from her wedding, and in the tenderness of people who never say "I love you" because their bond is so strong such words need not be spoken.

Their son, of course, thinks he is their opposite, and perhaps their better.

"We have given birth to strangers," his mother laments.

He becomes an architect and falls in love with a generic blond whose colorless WASPish family knows him only as Nick, which means they don't know him at all. The harder he pulls away from the anchor of his family, the harder his past tugs at his heart.

"We all came from Gogol's overcoat," his father tells him, echoing what Fyodor Dostoevsky said about the writer's influence. It is years before the son understands what it means. But in the context of "The Namesake," the metaphor suggests that what seems like two distinct stories - first of the parents and then of their son - is really threads from the same garment.

And how, when it comes down to it, everyone is the sum total of the people who named us.

In case anyone should have forgotten just how notoriously racist and idiotic Hollywood's portrayal of the "orient" can be, director Mira Nair has decided to jog our memories with her recently released film, Kama Sutra. By filling the movie end-to-end with sadistic princes, exotic harems, runaway slave-girls, conniving eunuchs and moustachioed guards wielding curved swords and limited vocabularies (yes-saheeb, no-saheeb), Nair has faithfully reproduced many of the most outrageous and absurd stereotypes of Asia that Hollywood has ever invented.

Over the years, films and characters such as Gunga Din, Charlie Chan, The King and I, Rambo, James Bond and Indiana Jones have in turn come to exemplify the utter arrogance and condescension that characterises Hollywood's overwhelmingly eurocentrist outlook. To date, Asians continue to be defined as either comical buffoons, or as tragic victims of "tradition" in desperate need of deliverance by western liberalism. More recently, Arabs and Muslims have come to be cast as fanatical terrorists bent only upon the wanton slaughter of innocents.

It would be easy to dismiss this phenomenon and this genre altogether as benign stupidity, and indeed, many films like the Kama Sutra are so appallingly poor in every respect, that they verge on the comical. But in an age where Hollywood's cultural savagery stalks virtually every corner of the globe, it is disturbing to think that people even in the Middle East or South Asia are often learning of their own cultures and histories through this distorted perspective. One is only reminded of the tragedy of North America's devastated native population, who learn a crude caricature of their own traditions and history through "cowboys-and-injuns" films.

Kama Sutra is itself supposedly set in 16th century northern India - but is otherwise quite unidentifiable in time and space. In an apparent effort to create an ultra-exotic big screen wallpaper, Nair has set her story against a visually enticing, but entirely baffling backdrop in which the palaces and deserts of Rajasthan appear to be but a short walk from the sculptures of Khajuraho and the banks of the Ganges.

Sixteenth-century Indian society was in the throes of deep social, political, ideological, cultural and spiritual ferment. Within years of the death of the scholarly Sultan Sikander Lodi of Delhi, the first battle of Panipat became the founding-stone of the Mughal empire under Babur, which was further consolidated and strengthened under Akbar. Rajasthan itself was aflame with the rise and fall of the great Rajput confederacy led by the Ranas of Mewar. It was the age of sufi and bhakta poet-saints such as Kabir and Nanak, whose message and muse would win the hearts of millions and leave an indelible mark on the popular consciousness for centuries to come. But if the makers of Kama Sutra should have chanced to hear of any of these developments, or indeed of anything that could betray even a remote acquaintance with Indian history, they choose to make no mention of it.

The story itself, which is far too embarrassing and flimsy to recount, revolves around four main characters, all of whom appear to have escaped from the set of a steamy daytime soap opera. In all fairness to the actors, of whom three are British and one is American, no amount of artistic ability on their part could possibly have overcome the sheer mediocrity of the clichÈ-ridden script, which Ms. Nair herself is partly responsible for. With an absurd story, poor acting, no script, and a profound contempt of history, it is clear that the only thing this film hinges upon is its repetitive and tedious attempts to create an aura of mystical and exotic sensuality. Beyond this, its provocative choice of name and much of its hype can only have been designed to lure in libidinous American soft-porn enthusiasts by conjuring up images of dusky maidens engaged in obscure and complex sexual practices.

It must also be borne in mind that especially since Mississippi Masala (1992), Mira Nair has sought to project herself as a spokesperson of sorts for second generation South Asians from Britain and North America. This factor also runs through Kama Sutra, which is scripted entirely in English, and in which the four main actors are themselves second generation South Asians.

In Mississippi Masala, Nair tackles the knotty question of identity and the "identity crisis". The central character in the film is a young American-raised South Asian woman grappling with the complex and often difficult condition that this society imposes on millions of immigrant families, particularly those not from the blessed "west". Similarly, Kama Sutra is also of significance to second generation South Asians insofar as it has pretensions to explore and expound on aspects of South Asian history and culture.

But on both counts, the verdict is disturbingly negative. In Mississippi Masala, the young protagonist ultimately overcomes her identity crisis only by completely severing all connections with her undesirable Indian background - and thereby becoming fully assimilated. Throughout the film, Indian culture is only characterised as parochial, oppressive and racist - in contrast to American society, which is glowingly cast as modern, liberal and tolerant. The Indians in the film are ageing tyrants and bumbling buffoons while the Americans are normal, rational, and worthy of emulation.

For South Asians living abroad, this kind of absurd and offensive depiction is only too familiar. It is prevalent not just in film, television or print media but appears to be the official outlook of the societies they live in, and is amply manifest for example, in the various "assimilationist" policies that they are victim to. For all its pretensions to "exposing racism", it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mississippi Masala itself sets new standards in the racist stereotyping of South Asians.

As for Kama Sutra, the less said the better. Are second-generation South Asians supposed to feel culturally enriched by being made aware of their sexually sophisticated ancestors? It is a wonder at all why Nair has chosen to make a film that is so historically inaccurate, and that gives such disproportionate prominence to the memory of a sixth century text within the context of a dismally enacted sixteenth century fairy-tale that has absolutely no relevance to the realities of the twentieth century.

If anyone should be shocked that such a grotesque caricature as this can be conceived at all today, then surely it is an occasion for even greater shock to note that it has actually been directed by a South Asian. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that a Bernardo Bertollucci or even a Cecil B. DeMille could come up with something quite of this calibre.

But Kama Sutra is only the latest entrant into what is a growing genre of contemporary literary and cinematic output by South Asians artists that is so steeped in eurocentrist cultural chauvinism that it can only conceive of South Asia through the eyes of a heathen-hacking Indiana Jones.

Sad to say, one can only conclude that Hollywood's oriental mystique has struck deep roots among the orientals themselves.

Mama Mira and the Vanity Project

One of the more interesting programs the American Film Institute puts on in Los Angeles is the Cinema Legacy series, which invites filmmakers to present a movie by a filmmaker who inspires them. I've had the good fortune to catch Agnieska Holland presenting Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur, Paul Schrader presenting Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, and just last week, Mira Nair presenting Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1957), his second film in the acclaimed Apu Trilogy.

Nair was born in India, in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, but eventually began studied sociology and cinéma vérité documentary filmmaking at Harvard University before coming to international prominence with films like Salaam Bombay! (1988), Missisippi Masala (1991), and Monsoon Wedding (2001), films noted for their spirited takes on social issues facing ethnic cultures, told with strong visuals and compelling performances. For several years, she lived in South Africa (where she is currently starting an annual young filmmaker's lab called Maisha) and is quick to present herself as an international filmmaker rather than a strictly Indian voice.

Nair is also a very lively and intelligent woman, who listened to audience questions and offered thoughtful commentary with conviction, speaking at length about her friendship with Satyajit Ray and the ongoing influence of his work.

Some highlights:

• She cites Resnais' Night and Fog, Marker's La Jetée, and Aparajito as her three favorite films, works she was introduced to at the university; Ray's films were unknown to her in India as a child living in a rural area who only occassionally saw Bollywood musicals. Her other Ray favorites include Days and Nights in the Forest (1970) and Devi (1960).

• She was most impressed by the photographic qualities of Ray's films, the framing and imagery of children playing or running through town or walking through grassland.

• When Nair began meeting Ray to show him her early work, they mostly discussed her films or the work of other filmmakers rather than his own; she described Ray as always being interested in contemporary cinema. "What was extraordinary about him was he was totally accessible," she said. "And he hand wrote these beautiful letters," where he was more open to discussing his own work.

• One of her favorite anecdotes was meeting Ray one evening at his home as he was entertaining guests. "He always had these gatherings of eccentric men or women, men mostly, talking about Tolstoy or talking about these arcane artists or filmmakers. . . . One time there was this coterie of people around him in his home and he was on the cover of India Today, which is like the New York Times, and there was one remark in it which was not terribly positive, and as I walked in to his sitting room, it was just like the setting of Two Daughters--there was the head librarian, there was the head professor, there was somebody else . . . and they were all reading to him reviews from his past, reminding him how extraordinary he was. And he would say, 'Oh, give me 1955' and someone would read these glowing reviews. . . . And I didn't know if he was taking it seriously or not. I said to him, 'This is just like in Two Daughters' and he just laughed and laughed, because actually, he saw what was going on. . . .

• She thinks his honorary Oscar gave him a great amount of pleasure, particularly since he always believed Hollywood had stolen his screenplay entitled The Alien--a story he submitted to Columbia in the '70s about an extra terrestrial arriving in a small Bengali village and befriending a boy--and transformed it into E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. (Spielberg later denied ever having seen Ray's script, which had circulated around Hollywood for several years.)

• Nair's favorite sequence in Aparajito is the scene when Apu's mother, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), is preparing food for her ailing husband (Kanu Bannerjee), and a man who lives in an upstairs apartment (who Ray has carefully established as an immodest and even flirtatious neighbor) approaches her from behind, carefully removing his shoes and softly inquiring about her activity. Ray shoots the scene from Sarbojaya's point of view , cutting to the man's feet, his removal of his shoes, and suspicious entrance. In fear of his motives, Sarbojaya whirls around in anger, holding a knife and demands that he leave; he quickly obliges. Nair highlighted Ray's deft command of framing and his crafting of an essential image that expressed the intensity of the moment.

• Nair's latest film, Vanity Fair is now opening in cinemas and she is currently preparing to shoot a screen version of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul as well as an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, a novel she recently read that she claimed "completely moved me to my bones."

But it was years before she brought such observations to the screen, choosing instead to make documentaries back in India, culminating in her 1988 breakout hit "Salaam Bombay," in which she used real street children as the actors.

"We paid for that movie by every scam in the book, frankly. Every night I would raise money for the next day of shooting basically."

A "Poet of Dislocation"

"Salaam Bombay" won the coveted Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and its success allowed Nair to focus on the themes for which she is now famous; to become a sort of poet of dislocation.

"I…had a lot of attention, and a lot of agents after me, and a lot of offers. I turned it all down because I had an idea always about making a film about being a brown person between black and white. My own experience at the university, which eventually came to be 'Mississippi Masala,' my second film, which was about the Ugandan expulsion by Idi Amin. He threw out all the Ugandan Asians who had been there for generations in Uganda. And about how they come to Mississippi, which is really what happened, and took over these motels, and sort of an interracial romance between a Ugandan Asian woman who leaves Uganda to come to Mississippi and falls in love with an African-American man — Denzel Washington's character — who has never known Africa as his home. Just like she has never known India as hers… The commonalities are huge between the African-Americans and the Indians, but no possibility of connection."

Not every Nair film, however, is about the immigrant experience. She directed Reese Witherspoon in the 2004 adaptation of the classic English novel "Vanity Fair." And in 2001, her film "Monsoon Wedding" became an international hit in which she took on the taboo subject of incest, set against the colorful backdrop of an Indian couple's arranged marriage.

"It opened up a whole lid of silence that is in our society, about pedophilia, about family abuse of any kind… Internal groups, debates, talk shows. Things like that happened after 'Monsoon Wedding.' It was amazing. I never expected that to happen."

Ironically, she often ends up teaching Americans about their place.

"I am an observer, very much so. But I'm also at home in America, different levels of America. America looks — has a superficial gloss of looking egalitarian but there are deep codes within America just like in Indian society."

Now as ever, Nair is a citizen of the world.

"I have the privilege of having three active breathing homes with clothes in the closet. In Kampala, Uganda, where I have my garden and my film school. But we live about seven, eight months a year here in Manhattan, where I've lived since '79 — not all the time, but a fair amount of the time. And my home is also in New Delhi, India, where my parents live, my brothers and their families are. And I run around, keep the airlines in business."

It's an existence she doesn't plan to give up, even when she's gone.

"I want to be cremated and have ashes, and I want to return to the dust from where I came. And I would love ashes to be sprinkled in my garden in Kampala. Why not, the Ganges and Hudson River wouldn't be too bad. I'm talking three continents quite easily."