‘It’s not about football, Nor is it about Parsis’

As French football star Zinedine Zidane, or Zizou, came to Bangladesh in 2006, he had no clue the visit would inspire an entire film. But that’s exactly what happened. Taraporevala wrote a script around it and the result is Little Zizou.

“The film’s about a 11-year-old football-crazy boy called Zerxes, who refers to himself as little Zizou and Zidane as big Zizou. When Zidane visits Bangladesh, Zerxes prays to his deceased mother to bring the football star to the country,” says Taraporevala, and quickly clarifies the film is not really about football as such.

Neither is it about Parsis, as the ads have been proclaiming. “Yes, Little Zizou is being pitched as a film about Parsis by the marketing team, but the story could have been set in any community. It is really about how love triumphs against all odds,” says Taraporevala, adding that this was the first script that was not commissioned to her by another director and hence she decided to direct it.

Before taking up the directorial baton though, Taraporevala enjoyed quite a successful stint as a writer on three of Mira Nair’s films, among others. The director of Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding got Taraporevala to write the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay, the Denzel Washington-starrer Mississippi Masala and had her adapt Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake for the big screen.

“After graduating together, Mira went on to make a couple of documentary films, while I went to New York University for film studies and followed it up with a stint as a still photographer.” It was at the Hyderabad film festival, where Nair was showing her documentary India Cabaret, that Taraporevala met her and Salaam Bombay was set rolling.

The 1987 film, about street children in Bombay (Sooni insists on not calling it Mumbai), was the second Indian film to be nominated at the Academy Awards and the first since Mother India in 1957. The film lost to Danish film Pelle The Conquerer.

But haven’t things come a full circle with a film with a similar plot, called Slumdog Millionaire, winning the Best Film at the Oscars this year and recognition for India too? “Can we please not go there?” Prod her a little further and she says with a deadpan expression “It’s good.”

As an after thought, she adds that Monsoon Wedding should have been India’s entry in the year it was released. Tell her that the film wasn’t Indian as the producers were based in America and she retorts, “Well, we’ve all been treating Danny Boyle like he’s Indian, haven’t we? Mira is at least actually ‘Indian.’”

Point noted. But it must have been quite something for a woman from India to walk the red carpet at the Oscars in as early as 1988? “There was no big deal about the Oscars then. People in India didn’t even know we went for it. There we were with a galaxy of stars and I was wearing this fatichar dress,” she says in typical Parsi style. “Of course, it was fantastic to meet Pedro Almadavor and all her wild, fantastic women from the cast of Women On The Verge Of Nervous Breakdown. The Spanish film was running in the Best Foreign Language Film category too.”

However, insists Taraporevala, there can never be any high as compared to the one of making your own film “Now if Little Zizou goes for the Oscars, It’d be something,” she grins.