The New Yorker Radio Hour - Riz Ahmed on “Mogul Mowgli”

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

As a rapper, Riz Ahmed has released critically acclaimed albums, and he was featured on the chart-topping “Hamilton Mixtape.” At the same time, he was becoming a leading man in the movies, with roles including a small part in the Star Wars picture “Rogue One” and an extraordinary, Oscar-nominated performance in “Sound of Metal.” Like his previous film, “Mogul Mowgli” is about a musical artist facing a health crisis that could end his career. Ahmed stars as the British-Pakistani rapper Zaheer—stage name Zed—and he co-wrote the film with Bassam Tariq. “It was very much a kind of inward journey,” Ahmed tells David Remnick. “It was very much about holding up a mirror and hoping that in the honesty and the vulnerability of that exercise, people would just connect emotionally—even if they couldn’t necessarily connect to the specificity of the experience. But for those who could connect to that specificity, you would be, like, ‘Jesus Christ, I never thought I’d see that onscreen!’ ” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As a rapper, Riz Ahmed has released a number of critically acclaimed albums, and he was featured on the Hamilton mixtape, which topped the Billboard 200. Immigrants, we get the job done. A-O-8, immigrants, we don't like that. Nah, they don't play. British Empire strikes back.

They're beating us like 808s and highhats. At the same time, Amid is built a remarkable career as an actor. This year he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as a heavy metal drummer losing his hearing in the film The Sound of Metal. And now comes a new film, Mogul Mogli. Ahmed plays a rapper named Zahir, or Zed for short. And like the Sound of Metal, it's about a musical artist who's facing a crisis that could end his career. Don't make me smash your melon up.

Try throwing a shade of melanin. Bonafido, I'm seven up. You're too sweet. I put the lemon in. They put their boots on our ground. I'll put my roots in their ground. I spit my truth in this brown. I don't give a fuck about the cash you stack

with the crown on your skull. You ain't baski out with the prince of Denmark. As Eddie boy piss on their benchmarks, to white kids want to be packs. Brown Planet is going to be that. The man frown panic I wanted me out, but I'm out standing because I stand out and where I was standing is going to be twice.

Riz Ahmed wrote Mughal Mowgli with director Basam Tarek and it's his first feature as a screenwriter. This movie is extremely emotional, extremely personal and an extraordinary, an extraordinary performance and I wonder what the origins of it

are for you. Oh, thank you first of all. I'm so glad you can with it. You know, it's weird in a way because part of me feels really proud to hear you say that. And yet another part of me is really squirming

and cringing in a way that I don't normally when I realize that someone's seen one of my films. But you saying those nice things about this film means that you've seen it. I have. If you've seen this film, then you've seen maybe a part of me and a part of Basam Tarek that you know

we don't normally show don't normally have the opportunity to show or aren't invited to and in a way that was that was the kind of inspiring idea behind the film which is what's the story that we don't see

what's the movie you never get to direct what's the character I never get to play and often in our kind of quest to kind of you know break down the doors for sometimes not very inclusive industry and in our well-meaning but slightly misguided desire to carry the burdens of representation for our community, we end up kind of trying to represent and try and enter rooms that we don't normally belong in. And what we realized is that the movie he never gets to direct

and the character I never get to play is us. The story we don't get to tell is the story of people like me and people like Bessam. And actually we realise the more radical thing to do is not to try and enter rooms where we may have been unwanted, but actually go home and actually to not try and represent other people, but to present ourselves. And so it was very much a kind of inward journey. It was very much about holding up a mirror and hoping that in the honesty and the vulnerability of that exercise, that people would just connect emotionally, even if they couldn't necessarily

connect to the specificity of the experience. But for those who could connect to that specificity, you would be like, Jesus Christ, I never thought I see that on screen. Well, obviously the film is about a young man who's from Pakistani British origins, who's an aspiring rapper and who's starting to accumulate some success

and is in the brink of a European tour and has a little break in kind of. comes home to visit his family for the first time in two years in London. Asalam al-a-a-a-a-a-go. And then discovers that he is quite ill, and everything goes off the rails. Now, I don't want to alarm you, Mr. Renoir, but from the scans we've done, your muscles seem to be weakening.

What is that? Like, is that a big stroke? It could be a number of things. We need to run some more tests to determine what course of action is best. Okay, so I can stop by in a couple of weeks. And it's got to be, I'm guessing here is, that this is a story that you were carrying around for quite a while? Yeah.

That's a good guess. It's one of those ideas that you just keep scribbling away at in a notebook somewhere and your iPhone notes somewhere. And you're never sure if you could ever kind of structure it into a story. If you can get it to cohere, is anything other than just kind of therapy? for yourself and then you meet someone like Bessam Dharic is this kind of uncanny mirror image in terms of his own background, working class, Pakistani American. This is your director.

Exactly, yeah, co-writer and director. And we were kind of able to be mirrors for each other to help organize and structure these thoughts and shape them into a story drawing from our own experience and the experiences of those around us. So, yeah, in many ways, I mean, this is a story I've been kind of carrying with me my whole life. I don't know, there's something kind of very liberating about making a movie that kind of satirizes and deconstructs your sense of who you are, you know, a public idea of who you are. Both as a rapper, musician, and also as an actor, you've had tremendous success. You're still in your 30s.

You've played a lot of roles and they range between the night of, a remarkable performance to being the, in a Star Wars film, how did you feel that your experience, your world, was not being represented quite yet? Well, it's interesting because, you know, I kind of feel that I've had to be a shape shift in my whole life. You know, I grew up very much code switching between different worlds from a, as I said, working class, Pakistani, you know, household, to a kind of predominantly white,

upper class private school and then kind of skipping class to hang out with my friends from my neighborhood, which was its own kind of hybrid kind of street culture. And so I was acting from a young age and kind of what I was taught from a young age implicitly by the world. And I think what the industry also taught me was, you know, shape-shifting will help you get by. But the one thing you can't be is yourself, your messy, contradictory self. That is a bit British, but it is a bit Pakistani and is a bit posh, but is a bit street, and is a bit of an actor, but also a bit of a rapper, that all these worlds that you kind of struggle, they all kind of look down at each other or frown at each other, that you're kind of straddling this fault line. And so you better shape-shift.

You know, you shouldn't enter any room with all of yourself. You need to leave a part of yourself with a door. And so that I think also was reflected often in the kind of roles that I'd play. I felt that, you know, I had to develop quite a wide range in terms of, you know, the roles I had to play because I didn't quite fit a mold. And I think I got to a point after having done a couple of bigger studio movies like Jason Bourne and Star Wars and Venom, where I realized, you know what, actually the way to, the next step really is isn't kind of putting on intricately made masks. for others, it's actually about taking the mask off. I've often been driven by this idea of stretching culture. And yeah, sure, part of stretching culture means having someone like me in a Star Wars movie,

but I kind of realized that actually perhaps the thing that doesn't exist in culture is a portrait of a character like this, like me, like Basin. I'm talking with Riz Ahmed more in a moment. It's so interesting. In fiction, you see this genre called auto-fiction, which is sort of heavily drawing off writer's life so that it's a combination of an essay and a dramatic novel, like in the conventional

sense. And I wonder if it, when you're making a film like this, which is a kind of auto fiction, what you choose to take from life, what you choose to leave to the side, and what you choose to embellish. The biggest embellishment, and thank goodness, is that you get so deathly ill here. Why did you decide that this was necessary as a dramatic pivot in this film. You know, it's strange because you kind of don't choose. You're always under the illusion that you're in control of making a film, but actually the film's always telling you what it is. And so you kind of lay out this mess of ideas and some of them are just kind of ideas that have come to you in the shower and some of them the things that happen to in your life and some of them

are ideas of what you think the film should be or could be and, you know, you're stealing ideas from other films that you like. And when you kind of lay it out on the table and start talking and start staring at it, it's kind of staring you down. And it tells you what it is. And I wish I could tell you that we kind of decided, you know, we're going to go 30% reality and 30% surreal, you know. But the character and the story very much started taking on a life of its own. It started developing its own internal logic. I think part of what kind of got the film to where it is was a desire on Basam Tyrox part to develop a kind of visual grammar of our own,

a visual language of our own. You know, Arthur Jeffer talks about black visual intonation. It's something that Khalil Joseph also talks about, you know, the idea that kind of African American or black cinema shouldn't just draw from Western Hollywoodian cinema, but it should kind of look at Miles Davis and jazz and black storytelling traditions. But Sam Tarik and I very early on in the process took a tour,

a really long guided tour of the Islamic art collection in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And we said, what's brown visual intonation? You know, what is our cinematic grammar and language? What can house the hybridity of our own experience? And ultimately, it was something that was hybrid in terms of genre. You know, this has elements of horror and comedy and musical and melodrama all wrapped together.

And it was also about incorporating the magical into the day to day. You know, I think the idea of magical realism, it's almost kind of, it's almost a defunct term, I think, in the South Asian experience and in the Muslim experience because magic mythology, spirituality

is embedded into our day to day. You know, it's kind of hardwired into the goggles through which we see the world. With regards to the autoimmune condition, it's fascinating because as we started researching this, we realize that people who live in diaspora and ethnic minorities have a far higher incidence of autoimmune illnesses than the general population. And there's a few different theories about why that is.

One theory is, you know, minority stress theory, which is that as ethnic minorities, the world is constantly implicitly telling you that you're on a threat, you're not welcome. So your immune system is in a state of hypervigilance, you know, it can't turn off. There's another theory which is that, you know, you just kind of. kind of don't belong in these societies. For thousands of years, your ancestors are in a different climate, had a different diet. And so, you know, it's teething problems. It'll take another millennium before your immune system knows how to process this new environment.

And then, you know, on the fringes of this way, you know, kind of around where medicine, well-being and spirituality kind of intersect, there's this idea that actually autoimmune conditions are kind of identity crisis that actually is the body's inability to recognize itself on a molecular level. And we thought it was just a very, very apt metaphor for what Zed's contending with in the film, which is who am I? Where am I from?

Am I an individual or am I part of a larger hole? And if the latter, can I pick and choose what I inherit and what I throw away, what I pass on and what I don't? So to me, it was this identity crisis played out on a biological molecular level and a way of making that conflict tangible. You talk about being unwelcome. If you know just a teeny bit about your life and career,

in other words, from a resume point, if you think, well, it's quite welcome. Here's this guy. He goes to Oxford and has extraordinary roles in the movies and a music career that's quite extraordinary. just had an album The Long Goodbye, which we can talk about in a second. That's one kind of welcome. But in an institution, for example, like Oxford, how is the unwelcome, how did that play

out in your life? And how does that inform a piece of art like the film you've just done? You know, it's interesting you should say is because I kind of feel like the barriers to achieving those things is exactly what spurs me on to kind of push harder and go harder. So, you know, at Oxford University, for example, you know, that's why I started putting on club nights and really was able to kind of hone some of my craft as an MC. It also, you know, provided income, frankly, for me to kind of stay on there. But I only put that club night on because I was told very explicitly by people as soon as I got there that I didn't belong there. You know,

I remember the first person I met at Oxford. I knocked on their door to see if I could borrow their phone charger. And, you know, I could tell it was going to be a pretty posh place. A lot of people in bowler hats and bow ties knocking around. And I asked like, you know, a terrible be sorry, I wonder if I could please borrow your phone charger. And she just laughed and said, oh my God, you remind me so much of Ali G, it's unbelievable. And as the first person I met, so I was like, all right, here it is. Off to the races. Yeah, first party I went to a couple of people in, you know, coattails telling me that you must admit, I mean, I mean, the British Raj, the empire, it did do a lot of good for India. I was like, hello, my name, you know, we haven't even

got to introductions. You know, it was wild in some way. And, You know, there have been a lot of barriers, a lot of obstacles in a way, whether it's facing violent racism in my own neighborhood growing up to, you know, institutionalized racism, you know, at my private school that I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to. And Oxford that was lucky enough to get to. And yes, there's this narrative of like gratitude and luck and good luck. But there's also, you know, just beneath the surface, there's the narrative of people trying to stop you at every turn and having to fight to

to the next stage and that continued very much in the world of film. They'll ask you where you're from. Now where you're really from? The question seems simple but the answer's kind of long. But I don't know what to say because anything I say is wrong. Britain's where I'm born and I love a cup of tea in that but tea ain't from Britain is from where my DNA is that. But where my genes are from people don't really emcee and that. You know in Mogul Mogulay something that's interesting, I think, about it is that it's not about the obstacles or grievances

from outside. It's about the obstacles within, the internalized self-hate and the gravitational pull of your roots that on the one hand have kind of fed your creative life and nurtured you and allowed you to do what you do. But on the other hand, are always threatening to just pull you down and drag you back into that soil that on some level you've always wanted to escape. So that push and pull between inspiration and obstacle is something that I'm very interested in. It's been a feature of my own life and it features very much in the film. Riss, I can't help asking you. We are talking a couple of days after the United States and so many other countries left Afghanistan after 20 years.

And it's the anniversary of 9-11 very soon. How are you thinking? about that right now. What a crazy 20 years. What a kind of bizarre and devastating collective insanity that kind of gripped

the planet, gripped the West that forced the East to kind of define itself you know, in opposition to the war and terror. Just the whole thing. It kind of feel like we're all emerging out of this collective trauma and 20 years in I kind of look back at my own life you know I'm 38 I was 18 when 9-11 happened and it's kind of defined you know our lives it's certainly defined a lot of

my career when I look back and look at my resume I mean like probably half of my output is a response in some way directly or indirectly to this post-9-11 era that we're all living under you know, an attempt to add nuance, complexity, humanity, some kind of reaction to this cloud that we've all lived under. And really, the way I'm thinking about it now is, I hope, honestly, it's just the end of an era. And I say that with no nostalgia. Riz Ahmed, thank you so much.

Wonderful to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Rizamut's new film is called Mogle Moke. co-written and directed by Basam Tarek. It's just out in the theaters now. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for now. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.