New York: Mira Nair's film, Amelia, based on the exploits of Amelia Earhart, the most famous female pilot in history, arrives in 800 US theatres on Friday testing whether the Indian director can win big Hollywood box-office receipts. Amelia is a star vehicle with two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor.

Fox Searchlight is distributing the film worldwide. It will be released in India in the first week of December. The biopic about the bold aviator fits Hilary Swank, the film's producer and star like a jumpsuit. "When I was growing up in Bhubaneshwar, Amelia Earhart was just an androgynous girl I had seen on a postage stamp," Nair told DNA on Wednesday on the sidelines of a sneak-peek of Amelia organised by the Indo-American Arts Council and Maisha Film Lab.

"When I was offered a chance to direct this movie, I started watching the 16 hours of newsreel that exist on Amelia. I was really struck by her brave ideas. She was truly modern, a yogini in the sky, a person who created her own rules," added Nair.
Amelia first took to the skies in 1920 in a plane that didn't have a gas gauge, brakes, or rear wheels. Nair opens the film with promoter and publishing magnate George Putnam (Richard Gere) auditioning the 30-year-old pilot for the role of first female to fly the Atlantic. In 1928, Amelia took a backseat to male co-pilots, but she soon took the controls as the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo and first aviator to twice fly the trans-Atlantic route.

"So much about Amelia is so undeniably modern," says Nair. "If she were to walk into a room today in her jodhpurs and her aviation jackets, with her ideas about marriage or men and women, she would still be considered an iconoclast."

Nair's biopic presents Amelia as a woman who refused to be forced into a straitjacket. She reluctantly wed Putnam after handing him a sort of pre-nup agreement. She refused to hold him to "any medieval code of faithfulness" and expected to enjoy her own sexual freedom. She made him promise that if the marriage didn't work out after a year he would let her go.

Whether stumping for female employment in the field of aviation, or pursuing an affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), the aviator father of writer Gore Vidal, the film's heroine lived life on her own terms.

"I am just the girl in the movie," joked Richard Gere, who plays the wind beneath Amelia's wings.

Gere described Nair as a "bulldog" for being tenacious about her artistic vision. "Mira is a bulldog. I am a bulldog too. We want things done in a particular way. Usually, we agree but we butt heads once in a while," the actor said at the film screening.

Nair reconstructs the real Amelia behind the smile and the rakish goggles but is limited by a script that ignores the aviator's early years as a rebel. Aviation enthusiasts will love the vintage aircraft. For the sequences involving Earhart's fatal flight over the Pacific, Nair's production crew tracked down one of just 10 remaining Lockheed Electras. The gleaming silver airplane was built in 1936.