MOVIES : Miami Masala : Director Mira Nair shifts from Indian culture to Cuban in ‘The Perez Family,’ where the air is steamy, the colors are golden--and the women are at the reins.

In a few minutes, gunshots will crackle over the blare of salsa music on the set of “The Perez Family.” Crew members wander through the crowd of extras, handing out pink foam earplugs as if everyone were going to a Metallica concert.

Anjelica Huston already has a snub-nosed revolver tucked away in a tiny white purse slung over her shoulder. Her hair cut short and shaggy, she practices a few salsa steps with the film’s director, Mira Nair.

In her high heels, the tall, elegant Oscar winner towers over Nair, but it is the resolute, Indian-born director who assumes the man’s role, steering the actress around the dance floor, maneuvering her into position for Huston’s big moment. Aroused by the sultry music, full of newly awakened sexual passion, her character will blast away at a menacing figure across the dance floor.

Once the camera crew has blocked out the sequence, Nair sternly coaches the extras. “When you hear the gunshot, you should either run away, hold your head or fall down,” she says firmly. “But do something .”

A pretty young woman asks: “Can we scream?” Nair nods her assent. “Scream, most definitely.”

After Huston practices drawing the pistol, her dance partner, actor Chazz Palminteri, takes the gun in his hand. Measuring its heft, he volunteers a few handgun tips he says he picked up hanging around undercover cops in New York. Nair hears him out, popping raisins in her mouth.

“That’s good, Chazz,” she says, handing the gun back to Huston. “But it’s Anjelica who has the gun. In this movie, it’s the women who have the power.”

Before you know it, Nair has the cameras rolling, filming Huston squeezing off a pair of shots. After she fires the gun--shooting blanks--Huston shudders with a small-caliber weaponry high, her eyes bouncing around in their sockets, her face flushed with excitement.

“My God,” she murmurs in a throaty purr. “I need a cigarette.”

*

When Mira Nair was a little girl, she went to see “Dr. Zhivago” at the only movie house in her hometown of Orissa. It was a sweltering summer day and the theater’s air conditioning had given out. She remembers sweating profusely as Omar Sharif romanced Julie Christie amid mountains of Russian snow. Finally, the theater manager appeared in front of the screen.

“There is no power,” he explained. “So please allow the snow to make you feel cold.”

Spurred by similar powers of imagination, the 37-year-old director’s films are bittersweet fables of transformation. Her acclaimed 1992 feature “Mississippi Masala” cast Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhoury as a pair of displaced lovers--an African American who has never lived in Africa and an Indian who has never lived in India--whose affair causes an uproar in their respective ethnic communities.

Born in an Indian “hick” town, educated at Harvard and married to a Ugandan political science professor, Nair is a filmmaker whose work--first in documentaries, later in feature films--has always explored the world of outsiders, people caught between two different cultures, unsure of where to make a home.

“The Perez Family,” due out Friday from the Samuel Goldwyn Co., offers another version of culture clash, its tale of prickly passion set against the brightly splashed pastels of Miami’s Little Havana. From beginning to end, the film is a woman’s story. Adapted by screenwriter Robin Swicord (“Little Women”) from a novel by Christine Bell, it has Nair in the director’s chair and two Oscar-winning actresses, Huston and Marisa Tomei, in the leading roles.

The story, made on a no-frills budget of $7 million, is constructed in the shape of a romantic quadrangle. Two exiles leave Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. One is Juan Raul Perez (Alfred Molina), gaunt and bedraggled after years of imprisonment in Cuba. He is accompanied by Dottie (Tomei), a saucy free spirit eager to taste the freedom of America. In Miami, seeing no sign of Juan’s arrival, his woebegone wife, Carmela (Huston), begins to fall for a handsome stranger, a police lieutenant played by Palminteri.

That’s just the beginning of the amorous entanglements for the women of “The Perez Family,” who are a far cry from the stereotypical Hollywood objects of male desire. Whether in bed or on the dance floor, they’re in the driver’s seat.

“This movie has a different kind of sexuality than we’re used to seeing in movies like ‘Body of Evidence,’ ” Huston explains. “I’ve always wondered why anyone in God’s name would think it was sexy to have someone rape you on the roof of a car in a parking garage. With Mira, sex is very visceral. She knows it from a woman’s point of view.”

Huston says she felt comfortable playing an intimate scene with Palminteri because Nair “took the starch out of the situation” by asking for input from her actors. “It’s a completely different experience than it would’ve been with a male director. Mira really knows what makes things sexy.”

Huston flashes a teasing grin. “I’d say the consensus is that Mira is probably very good in bed.”

‘Everyone is so hot ,” Nair triumphantly exclaims after a final rehearsal for the film’s climactic salsa-festival scene. “I swear, it’s like we’re all warming up for the Kamasutra.”

Guiding her Steadicam operator into the swirling mass of swaying bodies, Nair steers him toward a voluptuous dancer in a tight flamingo-pink dress, focusing on the woman’s ample derriere, which gyrates back and forth like a swinging door.

“The whole story has a deeply erotic subtext,” explains Nair, a strikingly self-possessed woman who patrols her set clothed in a baggy silk blouse, black tights and sensible flat shoes. “That’s why I’m so happy to have Anjelica and Marisa. They’re both totally fearless, especially about handling their sexuality.”

That doesn’t stop their director from occasionally prodding them for a little extra sizzle. When Nair spots Tomei and Molina dancing with all the fervor of chaperoned teens at cotillion, she storms onto the dance floor and personally squeezes her co-stars together until their hips are locked in a lambada-like vise.

“Come on,” she exhorts. “Give me a grind !”

Later Nair turns her attention to Angela Lanza, a young Cuban actress who plays Flavia, the salsa band’s tempestuous singer, who has been quarreling with her peevish husband. Nair is looking for a way for Flavia to express her unhappiness without interrupting the momentum of her vocal performance.

Finally, she hits upon an idea. “Give him the finger,” Nair instructs, boldly displaying her middle finger high in the air. “Then smile to one of the guys in the crowd. Blow him a kiss.”

She grins, muttering half to herself: “Rub salt in the bloody wound.” The gesture seems in keeping with Nair’s provocative, anything-goes directing style.

“Flavia and her boyfriend have just had a fight,” she explains. “So it’s important that she make a point of snubbing him but in a charming way.”

Giving your husband the finger is charming? “Oh, when Flavia does it, yes,” Nair says firmly. “After all, she’s a woman.”

Novelist Christine Bell was working in a local hospital as a cardiovascular technologist when the Mariel refugees began pouring into Miami. The city was turned upside down. Routine fender-benders turned into shootouts. Drug wars raged everywhere. The hospital’s emergency room overflowed with gunshot victims caught in the murderous cross-fire.

But what stayed with Bell was the woman at the hospital who had been waiting 20 years to see her husband. When the Mariel refugees arrived, her family organized a party to celebrate his arrival.

“I had all these romantic notions about what it would be like, to be reunited like that,” Bell recalls. “So a few weeks later, I asked the woman what had happened.

“And she said, ‘You know, I’d forgotten that my husband and I never really got along that well.’ ”

From such unexpected insights come literary inspiration. Bell waited several years, assuming that someone from Miami’s emerging Cuban literary circle would chronicle the Mariel experience. When no such book arrived, she wrote it herself. “The Perez Family,” her second novel, appeared in 1990, buoyed by a front-page Sunday New York Times review.

“It took about a half-hour for the phones to start ringing,” Bell recalls. “It didn’t sell many books, but everyone in Hollywood sure knew about it.”

At the urging of Julia Chassman, then a Universal production executive, the studio optioned the book and put Robin Swicord to work writing an adaptation. When the script was completed, Universal sent it to Sydney Pollack with hopes he would direct. He passed, but his Mirage production company took over the project, bringing in Latino director Alfonso Cuaron and assembling a cast including Ben Kingsley and Mercedes Ruehl.

But studio chief Tom Pollock was not enthusiastic about spending much money to make the picture.

“I think they looked at the story elements--it’s about women and Cubans--and they decided they couldn’t see the marketing handle,” Swicord says.

Even with the budget pared to $5.6 million, Universal balked. With the project stalled, Mirage dropped out as well. Egg Pictures, actress Jodie Foster’s production company, was interested, but talks broke off, Swicord says, when Foster seemed intent on introducing new themes, including a subplot about gay-bashing. In early 1993, knowing that their option was about to lapse, Chassman pursued other independent film companies, trying to find a new backer.

On the day their option expired, Swicord’s phone rang.

“It was Jodie Foster,” the screenwriter recalls. “She said, ‘I’m going after the option on ‘The Perez Family.’ But I just want you to know--I don’t intend to use your screenplay.’ ”

Even today, with the movie made, Swicord still sounds royally peeved by Foster’s surprise call.

“I was shocked,” she says. “We’d only had amiable discussions. But she was very full of beans at that stage of her career. She said, ‘Robin, there are 12 elements that make a screenplay a ‘go’ picture--and this script only has four of them.’ She thought she knew all the answers.”

Foster believes she acted honorably, both by personally calling Swicord to announce her intentions and by using her clout as a producer to help get the movie made.

“I’m a big admirer of Robin’s work,” Foster says. “But if I was going to try to make the movie, as a director I needed to personalize it. Robin had taken the script a long way, but the story needed a different voice--not a better voice but a voice to take it in a new direction.”

As it turned out, Chassman managed to line up an option bid from Goldwyn, which brought in Nair as director. When Chassman moved from Universal exec to “Perez Family” executive producer, a deal was struck: Universal took less money up front for the script in return for a significant profit participation in the film.

Convinced the film needed marquee names to bolster its box-office potential, Goldwyn opted to cast non-Latinos in most of the major roles.

“I looked high and low, but you have to cast someone who is pleasing both to the eye and to the soul,” Nair explains. “And in my terms of excellence, none of the Cuban actors could offer me what Marisa and Anjelica do.”

The bitter truth is that even in the world of independent film, star talent is a marketing priority.

“I did 19 drafts of this movie, and 16 of them were to make it cheaper,” Swicord says. “And I know that if we’d tried to make this film with only Latin actors, the film would’ve never been made.”

In the end, Nair chose British actor Alfred Molina (“Enchanted April”) to play Juan Raul, impressed both by his chameleon-like acting and his fluent Spanish. And somewhat reluctantly, she met with Tomei.

“I must admit I wasn’t that interested, because I’d never connected with her movies,” Nair says. “But when I saw her, everything seemed right. It was a physical thing. She has such a sensual, ripe face--it made her seem very fearless.”

The press-shy actress had her own doubts about being right for the part--but not because she couldn’t handle a Cuban accent.

“I thought a lot of the beauty of the role was Dottie’s nice Cuban ass,” says Tomei, still slender despite gaining nearly 20 pounds--at Nair’s behest--for the part. “I certainly didn’t have that. And I didn’t think I could get myself nice and round enough to do Dottie justice.”

After Tomei took the role, she found a trainer who’d worked with Robert De Niro when he beefed up to play boxer Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” She eagerly asked for his secret for putting on poundage. “He said, ‘No big deal. Just eat every two hours’!”

When Nair offered Huston the part of Carmela Perez, a woman in her 40s undergoing a sexual re-awakening, the actress was smitten.

“I don’t usually get to play a sexual woman,” says Huston, a lively conversationalist whose on-set reserve melts once her work day is over. “I’m generally being called upon to act very strong or scare small children. It was flattering that Mira thought of me as sexy. I’m not the sex symbol type--those parts usually go to Kim Basinger.”

Huston met Nair while both were serving on the 1990 Cannes Film Festival jury. Seeing the young director working the Cannes crowd offered a revealing glimpse of Nair as careerist.

“She had an extraordinary agenda,” Huston recalls. “She was everywhere at once, always aware of everything around her. When someone was having an interesting conversation, even four people away, boy would you see her eyes swivel! She’s like one of those Indian sculptures--a woman with many arms, all doing something different.”

One afternoon, Nair films a scene in which a throng of newly arrived Cuban refugees board a bus headed for a holding camp. One pair of extras instantly catches her eye--a tiny child, asleep in his father’s arms. The child’s shirt has red and white stripes, the father’s shirt is blue.

“Grab them!” Nair says excitedly, moving the two up to the front of the shot. Here was a perfect image to announce an immigrant’s arrival: red and white stripes with a swatch of blue--an American flag. Her crew has learned to adjust to such impulsive gestures.

“Mira’s so spontaneous,” explains Eduardo Castro, the film’s costume designer. “Yesterday, she decided to totally change Anjelica’s jewelry. Another day, she did a tracking shot over a crowd of extras, landed on someone we’d never seen before, and suddenly she started shouting, ‘Eduardo! Eduardo! Find me some interesting shoes!’ ”

Born into India’s middle class, Nair grew up in a culture relatively free of the octopus-like tentacles of American pop culture. Women of her generation still wore saris. Hollywood movies were rarely available for viewing--”Dr. Zhivago” was the only one Nair saw in her youth.

“India had a fantastic policy of cultural protectionism,” she recalls. “We never had McDonald’s. We had Coke but threw it out. All you could see were Hindi movies, which were the national films of India. But I hardly ever went--they were huge, escapist movies with borrowed Hollywood plots. You couldn’t even see Satyajit Ray movies outside of his hometown of Calcutta.”

At Delhi University, Nair acted in an avant-garde theater company. She earned a scholarship to Harvard but found its theater department painfully old-fashioned. Switching to film, she began making documentaries before eventually shifting to features so she could have more control over the story line.

“I got tired of waiting for things to happen,” she explains one night, getting a neck massage to fight off a migraine. “I wanted to make things happen. I wanted to choose what happened to a character, choose the light, choose the actor’s underwear.”

Before embarking on a film, Nair assembles a spiral-bound book of visuals to circulate among her crew. Her “Perez” collection includes a photo of an aged woman clutching a cross and another of young boys at a public urinal, one with a pigeon on top of his head.

Shooting a scene in which Carmela searches for her husband at a refugee disembarkation area, the director opens with a close-up of the back of Huston’s hair, which is tied in a bun, pinned together with two white orchids, a symbol to Nair of Carmela’s erotic nature. Unable to find her husband, Carmela ends the scene in tears, her hopes dashed.

Take after take, Huston lets her emotions surge, tears splashing down her cheeks. After one especially tumultuous take, she bolts away from the cameras, walking alone on a nearby hill. Nair hurries to her side, putting her arm around Huston’s shoulders. She consoles the actress for a moment before returning to her perch behind the camera.

“Twenty years of waiting for a man,” Nair says briskly, preparing for a new scene. “It would put any woman in quite a state.”