Little Zizou is the directorial debut of screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, who wrote Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! Mississippi Masala and The Namesake. This contemporary comedy is set amongst the unique and fascinating world of Bombay's Parsi community, followers of the prophet Zarathustra and tells the story of two very unusual families in conflict - one headed by a religious bigot, the other by a reforming journalist.
Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
October 27 2012. The Harvard Film Archive screened Little Zizou. This is a recording of the introduction and the Q&A that followed. Participating are Harvard professor Alfred Guzzetti and filmmaker Sooni Taraporevala.
Alfred Guzzetti 0:20
[BEGINNING AUDIO MISSING] She has many facets, but she wrote and directed this charming comedy, I think, about four years ago in 2004. She'll say a few words, by way of introduction. It is charming, delightful and light and it also has a bite.
[APPLAUSE]
Sooni Taraporevala 0:54
Thank you so much, Alfred. And thank you all for coming. It's a very heartwarming moment for me to actually have made a film at the ripe old age of fifty and have it be screened here where it all began in the wonderful Carpenter Center. Alfred was my teacher who I did a filmmaking course with, and upstairs I've done a little essay called “Carpenter Center Years” in which he features prominently.
Just a few words about the film. I've been a screenwriter for many years with my closest friend and collaborator Mira Nair. And after twenty-four years of writing about the world, about street kids and you know, Mississippi and all kinds of things, I turned to my own backyard, so to speak, when I made my first film. The film is set in the Parsi community. And just a few words for those who don't know, the context of the Parsis. We're a very, very, very, very tiny minority in India, and we would fill about a quarter of football or baseball stadium here. We’re that small. But at the same time, some of us want to keep ourselves kind of exclusive and not allow people to become Parsis or Zoroastrians. And for me that mirrors actually what's going on in the world today between the forces of—put it broadly—fundamentalism, and people who believe in a much broader world, don't believe in the concept “between us and them.” Anyway. So that's the context. And I will be here to answer your questions along with one of the actresses from the film, Iyanah Bativala, after the film. Thank you. I hope you enjoy it.
[APPLAUSE]
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Alfred Guzzetti 4:20
Before we plunge into the Q&A, I'm going to ask Sooni just one Q. When I saw this film three, four years ago, I wrote her a letter in which I said, “I love the boy's narration, the writing and the delivery, the immensely clever idea of the older brother's graphic novel and the way it transforms the reality around him. The drawings made me think about the film itself, how it observes the people in places in the community, exaggerates some eccentricities, turns people gracefully and effectually into comic figures. I love the man who listens to Italian opera with the volume turned up, the eccentric grandmother, the deus-ex-machina appearance of the Canadian engineer searching for a community. There's a wonderful sense of community, an affection, an exaggeration of all things and people that I can imagine is real. I especially like all the ways that the people and the details fit together to make a microcosm and the fairytale ending was wonderful. But in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't really believe that there could be–” Let me see exactly what I said. “I wasn't convinced by the villainous father. For some reason, I couldn't believe that this benign community could have given rise to a fascist demagogue of racial purity, and I didn't believe what he said.” And I asked Sooni about that and I thought that would set her up to give the answer that she gave me three or four years ago.
Sooni Taraporevala 5:55
Thank you. You've been a wonderful audience. It's a comedy. And when you sit in a comedy with an audience, and they don't laugh, it's just a killer. You guys are great, so thank you for that.
Answering Alfred's question about the villainous father, the comic book villain, I actually took his dialogue from, well, the credits say everything is fictional, but that's not true. He was inspired by real-life figure in our community and everything that he said, all the outrageous things he said, I got verbatim from a speech he gave. So such people also do exist. But I'm happy that after this film, he's kind of sobered down, because I think he realizes that there are people who just, you know, make his dialogue into a big joke. So that's the story with the comic book villain. However, having said that, I'm not there at every screening to explain that, so if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And it's a lesson for me to have learned for the future, to perhaps tone it down a bit.
Alfred Guzzetti 7:08
[INAUDIBLE] –documentary filmmaker pointing out the reality and being completely wrong! Completely!
Sooni Taraporevala 7:16
Questions anyone? I also want to say, I'm blessed to have two of my professors here today: Alfred Guzzetti, as well as the wonderful Bob Gardner. I don't know if he's still in the audience or if he’s left.
Audience 1 7:39
So I have actually been to Bombay and seen a couple of, I think, they are Parsi guys who have actually done that aircraft simulator thing.
Sooni Taraporevala 7:47
Yeah. That was inspired by real life as well.
Audience 1 7:50
Yeah, I figured as much! I was just curious because the film has so many main stories, so to speak, there's the fascist demagogue person, there's Little Zizou, there's the kind of crazy idea of the cockpit simulator—which I would not have believed at all had I not actually seen this thing in Bombay. What ties all of these stories together in your mind? Apart from the fact that, obviously, that you have fictionalized the connections. That aircraft simulator, these two other people? I'm assuming the demagogue is somebody else, I didn't know of him. So what made you bring them all together? Was it largely to sort of paint a picture of the Parsi community, which tends to have an eccentric kind of a reputation in Bombay and in India in general? I'm just curious.
Sooni Taraporevala 8:52
I guess I'm an eccentric Parsi also to have written a script like this, because it does go against most of the rules of screenwriting that you learn about having a central story. And as you said, this had lots of stories. You know, the way it happened, the way I wrote this, was very kind of unusual, because I started with something and then I would meet people and they would work themselves into the script. For example, Tito Fellini, he is someone I met while I was writing the script, and he turned out to be really half-Parsi, half-Italian, so I wrote him into the script. The flight simulator is actually being made by another friend who refuses to be named because he doesn't want to be kicked out by his landlord. [LAUGHS] So again, that was something that I worked into the script and lots of things like that I wrote the roles for a lot of actors and actresses who are in the film. And that's why it's such a—as we say in Hindi—a kitchari, which is kind of a mixture of different things. And that's also why I wanted to direct it because I thought anybody else who would get a script like that would want to turn it into a conventional kind of narrative, and I wanted to be as quirky and eccentric as possible.
I have my actress with me and I'd like to call her up even though she's mortified and blushing: Iyana Bativala!
[APPLAUSE]
Audience 2 10:35
I was wondering if you've had any sense of what the effect of the film has been within the Parsi community. Clearly, it's not made only for them, but I'm wondering if you can tell us about how the Parsi community has reacted to this, and if it's helped lead to any kind of change.
Sooni Taraporevala 11:00
I think the community has reacted really well to this film. Lots of people really, really enjoyed it. Because I think what happened was a lot of people feel the same way, but they haven't been able to express it. And it's a nice way to be able to express it with humor, which is also why I didn't want to make a serious film. I wanted to address these issues with humor. I didn't want to dignify this kind of person, this kind of comic book villain, with serious intent. I wanted to mock him and make fun of him. And I think that really worked. And as I said, he's kind of sobered down after this film. I'd like to believe it's because of the film!
Audience 3 11:47
[?How is it being?] directed by your mom?
Iyana Bativala
[LAUGHS] No, she is great.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]
Iyana Bativala
Actually, she did forget to say “cut” a lot of the time.
Sooni Taraporevala 12:05
Yeah, I did. That was one of my strategies to let it keep rolling, because a lot of nice things happen when you don't say “cut.” But in one of the Q&A's when they were asked this, when they were younger, they said it was really good because I was much kinder on set than I am at home. [LAUGHS]
Audience 4 12:25
Alfred had said that the film was a comedy. And it is; there's lots of comic situations, but it seems to me the real comedy’s built into the sort of affectionate and intelligent dialogue and the kind of banter back and forth, which is incredibly funny and sweet. And the whole film seems to be animated by that, which is this sort of cultural—I don't know what exactly, but that's sort of what I hooked on throughout the entire film. And I'm wondering, as a writer, how you thought about that, and whether you think what I'm saying is even remotely true.
Sooni Taraporevala 13:00
I have to give credit to my actors for some of the dialogue, because one of the advantages to being a writer/director is that you can be really loose with your script, and I was, and I invited improvisation. At all times, I wanted to make my actors as comfortable as possible in front of the camera, and that meant allowing them every freedom that they wanted. And I think it helped. And I think it added, and I think a lot of that real life that you see comes from a combination of the actors and the script and real life situations and a most wonderful crew that I had. When we shot it, it was really, I mean, it's a cliche, but we really had a family atmosphere. There were no blame games. So it was really a very good experience, and I think that joy comes across in this film. I'd like to believe that it does.
Audience 5 14:08
Hi, I'm a Parsi from Bombay and I've grown up with your coffee table book Parsis since as long as I can remember. So thank you for being here. As a Parsi in Bombay, I struggle with the orthodoxy that seems to have arisen in the religion since I've grown up. Drawing on the social commentary aspect of your film, how can we really move forward as a community without angering those who believe in purity of the religion? What do you see as the pathway forward for the Parsis?
Sooni Taraporevala 14:43
I think the way forward is what Leanna says in the film, which is actually from the Bible, which I know very well, having been to a Protestant missionary school for thirteen years and doing Bible studies every morning. I believe that love is the answer. And I believe thinking about others and not being cruel is the answer. And I think that is not just for the Parsis, I think, across the board with every religion. I think religions come into existence with a very good reason and with the best of intentions, and I think they get corrupted along the way. And I think that they need to get back to that fundamental concept of why they were invented, which is to help us to live with each other with dignity and grace and tolerance.
[APPLAUSE]
Audience 6 15:38
I’m a friend of Sooni’s and I grew up in Bombay too, with an American mother and Parsi father. So I know firsthand about the mixture and stuff. My grandmother was a devout Parsi and my dad married an American lady and my father was thirty-eight when he got married, so my grandmother was very happy when he finally got married—even though she wasn't American. But my mother brought me up as a Parsi. She raised me as a Parsi in Bombay and I think that's the luckiest thing I've ever had. I grew up as a Parsi. And I think everything in the movie is very realistic. It's exactly how it happens. The dialogue is exactly how we say we speak to each other the same way and we have the same serious concepts told in a half-joking manner. And that's the way we are. Because nothing has to be too serious. I guess, Sunni, the way I was brought up in life to compromise love and affection for each other and kindness for the community. And India, with the multicultural aspect of India, that Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, which was in the movie, that's how we are. That's how we've been brought up and I think Parsis have been experts at it for now 500 years, 1200 years, we've been in India. So I think that came across very well. And I guess it's not a question.
[LAUGHTER]
Sooni Taraporevala
[LAUGHING] Well said, Dr. Mehta!
Audience 6
But it's very close to me, this movie, so…
Sooni Taraporevala
Thank you.
Audience 7 17:22
Hi Sooni. I also have a comment. I'm Rita Kapadia and this is Jamshed. We are Parsis. Both of us [INAUDIBLE] very traditional Parsis. And we have been living here in New England, Massachusetts for the last thirty-two years. Jamshed has been here for forty years. And it's just I really commend you on doing these kinds of movies. We just bought a condo here in Cambridge. We lived in the suburbs, and it's just thrilling to see Parsis in action again. You know, I'm just kind of talking off to my head here. So thank you so much for doing this.
Audience 8 18:29
So I was very struck by that, because, of course, it was reminiscent of pictures of the Holocaust. So while this was very comic, and full of fun and affection and warmth and an introduction to a marvelous community that I knew nothing about—and I'm absolutely fascinated—I was very much struck and taken by the scene at the beginning, because you were saying so much in this. With all the fun, that was the big point. The purity, what the Nazis did. It was just incredible. I loved every minute of the movie.
Sooni Taraporevala
Thank you so much.
Audience 9 19:33
Hi. Thank you so much for being here. I was curious how your time here informs your filmmaking, first of all, and also how your background as a screenwriter influences your directorial style. Two questions in one.
Sooni Taraporevala 19:50
Well, the first part of your question: I owe everything to having been here. I discovered film as an undergraduate here my first semester. And I followed it through by studying films, both analyzing them, as well as learning how to make a film in Alfred Guzzetti’s course. So I created my undergraduate years with starting everything—my photography as well as my film. So it's really a homecoming for me. And I feel very, very happy to be back here with a film that I made.
The second part of your question, how does screenwriting affect the direction? I have a little theory which is that every screenwriter should be made to direct a film. And every director should be made to write a screenplay. And I think it's only when you actually do it that you understand exactly what it entails. Screenwriting, of course, I've done it for twenty-four years, so I know how to write a script. But direction was a completely completely different thing. My friend, Mira gave me lots of excellent advice. I went to her for advice all the time. And one thing she told me—because I was comfortable with the photographic part of it; I'm a still photographer, and I was comfortable with everything else, except directing actors, because I had not done that before. And the piece of advice that she gave me—which I followed all the way through—was to make them comfortable, to make them feel loved and protected, which is what I tried to do at all times. And it really worked well.
And yeah, that's it. But direction is very, very stressful. It's a joy, but it's very stressful. And what's stressful is keeping the clock and you know, having to go through the day and make that many scenes and always being conscious of the budget. And at the same time being loose enough to improvise. Every night, I'd go home and I watch what we had shot because I would allow improvisation but I didn't want it to get out of hand and be completely out of control, not knowing where I was going in the film. And so keeping all that and then post-production is another huge thing. I don't know, in the future, I think people are going to marvel at the way we made films because it's so detailed and so laborious and so labor intensive—every little aspect of it—which you don't realize till you actually do it. And with directing, the buck stops with you with screenwriting, it doesn't. There's always someone else to blame. So that's the big difference. But I enjoyed it. I'd love to do it again.
Audience 10 22:41
What was your experience [with] the interaction between the movie director and the movie editor? Did you do the editing yourself also?
Sooni Taraporevala 22:56
No, I didn't. I worked with two editors, actually: Woody Richmond—who actually his tradition is documentary film editing—as well as Krissy Boden, who does a lot of narrative features. So I worked with both of them. I could never have edited this myself. It was a very complicated job to edit this because there were so many—as someone remarked—so many different strands, so many different stories. What Krissy did– She was the second editor. She brought it all together and she made things clear. And so no, I didn't edit it myself.
Audience 11 23:35
I really enjoyed this scene sort of towards the end of the film with the children on the beach. And I was struck by when they started sort of throwing the mud in the sand at each other. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how much of that scene was planned out in advance. I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, but there's sort of like a lot of mudslinging by the adults happening in the film. And, I was just sort of wondering if you could talk a little bit about the innocence of the children and how that scene came together.
Sooni Taraporevala 24:06
That scene was actually one of the toughest scenes to shoot for all kinds of reasons. We were on the beach, and we were on a beach where we didn't know when it was going to be high tide, low tide, you know, there was no sand. It was a nightmare of a shoot. But the kids were just amazing. The mud fight was written in, I think it was inspired by the children. I wrote the roles for my children up from, you know, things that I'd seen them do and heard them say, so a lot of things came from them in the past. And I think the mud fight probably also came from that. It was in the scriptm, so it wasn't improvised in that sense. But the shooting was very difficult. And the scene that you see was actually probably one take. The first time we did it, it wasn't good for me. It was my fault because I had it in a wide shot. I had a Steadicam; it didn't work. Second day, we did it in close-ups, and it worked. And the kids were just amazing. They nailed it in, I think, one take before the sun went down, before the sun disappeared, all those things. And it's one of my favorite scenes because they did it so well.
Audience 12 25:30
Did you have your children in mind when you were writing the script or were they like, auditioned or …?
Sooni Taraporevala 25:39
No, no, it was pure nepotism! [LAUGHS] No, I'm joking. I had them very much in mind. I wrote the roles for them. And I would not have made it without them. Because I wrote the roles knowing that my kids could do this very well. Because as I said, I used a lot of what I've heard them say and do. And so they were comfortable in the roles and t I mean, it took four years after I wrote the script or when we shot the film. So they had been through every draft and they were totally comfortable with the script. And I very much wrote it with them in mind, but I also wrote it with the other actors in mind. Boman Presswala, I didn't even bother changing his name. Sohrab Ardeshir, the looney dad, I wrote it with him in mind. Shernaz Patel is called Miss Patel. I didn't change her name either. (By the way, I told her I’d give a shout-out to her: Happy birthday, Miss Patel!) So a lot of the actors... Tito Fellini, I wrote it with him in mind. Artexerxes Koraji was written with him in mind. So I did what you’re taught never to do, which is to write roles with actors in mind.
Audience 12 26:47
[INAUDIBLE] –personality of how they're depicted or in real life, or are they entirely different?
Sooni Taraporevala 26:53
The actors or the kids?
Audience 12
The kids.
Sooni Taraporevala
No, they're different, but the sibling rivalry was real. [LAUGHS]
Audience 13 27:20
I thought one of the many nice things about the film was the Indian English idiom that was captured and the intonation as well. There was none. It sounded real, etc. So I was wondering, A. Why English? And I was wondering how you manage that balance, because very few Indians speak in English continuously, steadily only in English. And the film isn't like that. But I was just wondering how you got that balance, and whether it was just writing it out and playing it out and having really good actors acting it out or whether you wrote it with that...
Sooni Taraporevala 28:03
I wrote it to sound as naturalistic as possible, and I I wrote it to be a film in English, because actually, these characters would be speaking in English. Had they not been speaking English, I would have written it for another language, because I always wanted to be as natural as possible. And my actors, I gave them freedom to change lines and to say things that they were comfortable saying. And I hate this kind of elocuted English that you're taught to speak in school in India, or this kind of British-English, except, of course, for the main character, but Sohrab actually does speak a little bit like that, so he wasn't really even putting that on. So that's it. I tried to be as natural as possible, and I'm glad you found it so.
Audience 14 29:00
Sooni, were you ever afraid that this movie would be seen too much as like a family, I don't know, like made-in-your-own-backyard kind of hobby project? Because like you said, you had everyone in mind before you wrote it, and it's very personal to you. YSo were you ever afraid that that would get in between making a good movie that would be accepted by the wider audience? And just a project that you did out of fashion?
Sooni Taraporevala 29:29
Oh, no, because I do believe that the local is universal. And the more particular you are, I think the better you can convey things. I believe in being personal actually. I think just because something is personal doesn't make it a home film. And I was hoping that these issues would have resonance in other communities, because they are not only issues that Parsis face. My children have different last names from me, so, if you are watching the film, you wouldn’t know that they were my kids. So that aspect of it… No, I didn't. I wasn't afraid that it would be seen as a home film, and I hope you didn't see it that way either.
Audience 15 30:21
Thank you. I was really taken with the role of dancing in the film and just how evocative it was at different moments for different moods, and was that improvised from the actors or that was just something that you would kind of ask them to carry through from the beginning? How did that work?
Sooni Taraporevala 30:43
I wanted to contrast the two families, and the way I contrasted them was that in one family, there was color and light and laughter and dancing and music, and in the other family there was none of that. And the actor Boman, I discovered very early on was a fantastic dancer. “Mambo Italiano,” he did. Actually, when he started doing it, I asked my producing partner Dinaz, I said, “Do we have money to roll full-take?” She said, “Yeah, go for it.” And so that is actually one take that he did. He's a fantastic dancer. So it was written in, but it got emphasized a lot more because he was such a good dancer. And the music is strange, because you think, “What's this Italian music—American Italian music—doing in a film based in India?” But my family, my father and I, grew up listening to this kind of music and I just wanted to put it in because I actually do love it as well. And it caused a lot of headaches with licensing and money to get rights for the songs. So they're all covers, actually, sung by Gary Lawyer who is singing along with Boman in that “Amoré” song. He sang all the music.
Audience 16 32:14
I'm a non-Parsi from Mumbai—or Bombay, I should say—and this was just phenomenal. The entertainment value of this movie was great. I loved it. I loved the Marathi. I loved the Parsi. This is how people spoke. And so it was very real. It was great.
Sooni Taraporevala
Thank you. Thank you.
©Harvard Film Archive
Little Zizou screens in tandem with Taraporevala's photography exhibition Parsis: The Zoroastrians of India, on view October 25 through December 20 in the Sert Gallery at the Carpenter Center.
