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Britain’s hottest director —Gurinder Chadha
IN 1998, Gurinder Chadha sat down and thought, sod it — I’m not going to put up with this anymore. She had already put up with it for five years. After making the film Bhaji on the Beach, the work had dried up and she had supported herself doing bits and pieces for television. She had been on breakfast telly and Gaytime TV; she had worked on a script about a Sri Lankan refugee family, but there wasn’t exactly a stampede to finance it. She was too niche, or too ethnic. And so, at 37, after five fallow years, she sat down and thought, sod it — I’m going to write the most commercial movie I can with an Indian girl in the lead.
The success of Bend it Like Beckham, which grossed some $60m in America almost entirely by word of mouth, has changed Chadha’s life, and not just to the extent that she has finally been approved for a mortgage. We order a huge meal in a curry house in Southall, west London, where she grew up and where she is staying at her mum’s while editing her new film, Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood-style version of Jane Austen’s novel in which the Bennetts are transformed into an Indian family from Amritsar. People at surrounding tables stare at Chadha and the manager bends double in his efforts to please. In this neighbourhood, she is a hero. “I always wanted to be more than what was expected of me as an Indian girl,” she says and sends back a dish because it isn’t hot enough. The manager gives her a free copy of the Good Curry Guide. “Brilliant!” she shrieks, teasingly. “Now next time I’m in the Channel Islands or on the Isle of Wight I’ll be able to find a good curry.”
The success of ‘Bend it Like Beckham’, which grossed some $60m in America almost entirely by word of mouth, has changed Chadha’s life, and not just to the extent that she has finally been approved for a mortgage
The making of Bride and Prejudice required enormous feats of diplomacy. It was shot on three continents (although with a budget of only Pounds Sterling 12m, Chadha had to be inventive: for a hotel in Beverly Hills, read Stoke Poges golf club) and the cast came from three, very different acting traditions. “It was tough because every actor thought their way was best. The Americans thought Bollywood was very inferior. And the British actors thought they were better than the Americans. I felt like Russell Crowe in Master and Commander; it was my job to keep on course and I kept steering it with my map of British-Asian sensibility. What I’ve ended up with nods to Bollywood and to Hollywood and elements of it feel like the movie Grease. But it is actually a very British movie.”
Chadha wants to make “joyful affectionate films” about the world that she comes from, because “I’ve seen a lot of dross about the Asian community. There’s not a lot of people who do what I do, I feel, which is to celebrate and revel in their Indianness and their Englishness.”
It wasn’t always so. When she was growing up, the daughter of two shopkeepers who moved from India to Kenya and finally to London when she was a baby, she wasn’t interested in being anything other than regular, i.e. not too Indian. She refused to have dance lessons (“I didn’t want to be seen as this nice little girl doing Indian classical dance and all that”) or watch any Bollywood films. As far as she could tell, India made life difficult; before he bought the shop, her father was a postman and a gasman and when he tried to get a job in a bank, she says they told him, “sorry, we’d never hire someone with a turban.”
At that stage of her life, Chadha wanted to be a long-distance lorry driver, which she reckons was her nine-year-old way of saying she wanted to escape (she did run away once, and made it to the bottom of the road carrying a cardboard box containing two pairs of knickers, a bread knife and a can of baked beans). At school her favourite subject was geography because “I realize now it was the one subject that gave me an international perspective. It taught me about other people.” At 18, she won a place to read development studies at university where she partied, cut her hair and permed it, and when her mother went mad, told her she had been forced to because of the split ends. “My mum said, everyone in India has long hair — they don’t have split ends. Then I put pink bits in it.”
She imagined she would end up working for Oxfam, only it turned out that all the “dev” lecturers drove her mad. There was one, she says, who wore Indian clothes and always pronounced Indian place names with a phony Indian accent. “Tamil Nadu! It used to really get on my nerves. Most people were too right on in ‘dev’ to find it funny. They were all so earnest. I was just angry all the time and I realized it was because they were taking people who looked like me and continually pushing them into the poverty category. that was their job, but it made me cross. Then I went to India for a year and read a dissertation about women in the media and something went off in my head; media, race awareness. So I wanted to create better images of people like me.”
Twenty years later, Chadha finds herself, to her surprise, positioned as one of the most commercial film directors in Britain today. After college she worked as a radio journalist, which she abandoned because she found it “full of people being self-important about things that I didn’t think really mattered,” and then made a short film called I’m British But, with the help of the British Film Institute. The images of “people like me” in the media still dissatisfy her. “There’s a lot of people who like to take the mickey and do cheap comedy. And that’s fine; have your gags, do all that.” I wonder who she means when she refers to “cheap comedy.” Does she, for example, admire the BBC2 comedy The Kumars at No 42? She grimaces. “Have some kebab,” she says and bursts out laughing. Well? “Well, there’s a school of thought that thinks that the Kumars are pure uncle Tomism.” She smiles again, luridly. “On the other hand, it’s good that there’s a comedy like that that gets high viewing figures and that people enjoy.” Bombay Dreams, the West End show based on Bollywood, was not her favourite production either; in fact, she thought it was, “terrible. An awful pastiche.”
Chadha and Meera Syal, the show’s writer, fell out violently after making Bhaji on the Beach together. “The only elements that worked in Bombay Dreams were the ones done by hard-core Bollywood people, like the choreography.”
In Bride and Prejudice, Chadha hopes she has paid affectionate (and knowledgeable) tribute to the genre. It frustrates her that western audiences can only identify with Bollywood as kitsch; actually, she says, if you understand the conventions, there is a lot more to it. “The majority of them are crap. But out of every 100, five are really good. And that’s the same for Hollywood.”
She shed her distaste for things Indian a long time ago and believes, now, that maintaining one’s cultural differences is a good thing, if for no other reason than that it gives us all something to talk about. Chadha’s husband, Paul, who co-wrote Beckham with her, is Japanese-American and they married in the Sikh temple in west London, the one that featured in the film. It took Paul six months to grow the regulation beard. Her mother was so relieved that she was finally getting married, that, says Chadha, she didn’t even kick up a fuss about him not being Indian.
Chadha is relaxed about her own future, particularly since going to an astrologer who told her two things. The first was, “you like your food.” She laughs. “Ha! That’s true. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai.” And the second thing he said was that she was going to have a very long life: “very long and very peaceful. So now I don’t fret about anything.” And she laughs long and loud.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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