She was transplanted from Kenya as a toddler to Britain where her father was turned down for a position at Barclay’s Bank in London because he was a Sikh.
After stints as a BBC news reporter, she went on to direct award-winning documentaries for the British Film Institute, BBC and Channel 4. Today Gurinder Chadha is being hailed as the most successful Indian woman filmmaker from Britain after the resounding success of her third feature film Bend it Like Beckham both in Britain as well as globally.
On a tour for the nationwide release of her film in the United States, Chadha sat down for an interview with Little India, after having some fun with a sheepish, but unrepentant, video store owner after identified herself and she scolded him for renting pirated copies of her film.
The issue of piracy is becoming monumental among South Asians worldwide isn’t it?
I do need to stress this very strongly that even though most of the Indian community has seen the film on pirated copies it is so critical that they come and see it in cinema halls, because it will encourage more finance for South Asian film makers.
In Britain the people did just that and it was such a strong signal to the British film industry, where initially being resigned to having a hard time to find finance for my film because they thought there wont be an audience, to finding instead such a huge audience. So in Britain now people are looking forward to seeing films on Indian subject matters, because the financiers have seen a huge audience and made money. Here in America I know of one story at least where a big American company was looking to finance a film by an American born Indian director and decided to pass on the film because of the piracy problem. They felt that if they did finance the film the Indian audiences will watch them on pirated DVDs/videos and they won’t make money. So that is one person whose career has been damaged because of his community.
Your first feature Bhaji on the Beach won numerous International awards. It was cultural comedy where three generations of Indian women take a day trip from London to the seaside town of Blackpool, yet it brought out some dark cultural issues, and your second film What’s Cooking, which was filmed in USA, explored the cultural, familial, social issues of four very different families, African American, Latino, Jewish, and Vietnamese as they celebrated Thanksgiving in Los Angeles. What were the experiences making these two films?
Bhaji on the Beach was an art house release. It got a cult following in the art house crowd, but was not a commercial success. We grew up around the issues that are detailed in the film. What’s Cooking is a very British film about America. It was originally titled American Pie, but we had to change the name because of another movie by the same name.
You collaborated on the script of What’s Cooking with your husband Paul Mayeda Berges who is a native of Los Angeles. How uniquely different was your perspective from his?
He would take things more for granted but I would ask more for depth in terms of asking about the class background of people, because most people in America are from the middle class, in a way he had never explored before. So I was asking for more specific things like how do they cook their food, what ingredients do they use, where do they shop? This helped make the characters three-dimensional for me a lot of times.
You said that lot of the characters brought their own perspective into the movie. So how much improvisation did you allow?
There was very little improvisation. What the characters did was to make their interaction with each other very real, very comfortable. They took the words and brought them to life and acted as real families would act. I find that if the script is tight you can give the actors an opportunity to improvise in the way they speak their lines, but at the end of the day you invariably return to the script.
Were you surprised at the fact that What’s Cooking didn’t do well commercially in spite of receiving such critical acclaim?
In America people see race first and the movie second, which is why Bend it like Beckham has been such an enormous success not only among Indians but also the British who saw it as a British film about London where the girl just happened to be Indian, whereas in What’s Cooking the Americans and other ethnic groups said “oh this film is about black, Latino, Vietnamese and Jewish people so its not for us.”
How has the audience changed since the time you made Bhaji on the Beach to Bend it Like Beckham?
Bhaji on the Beach was shown in 5 prints. Bend it Like Beckham is being shown in over 450 prints, and that itself is an indication that the British film industry has changed a lot. Earlier even the British preferred to see Hollywood films and not British films. Today there is a British film industry that is thriving now and a huge audience for British films.
Bend it Like Beckham is again a film about cultural issues, a young girl from a traditional Indian family who wants to be a football star while her mother wants her to make perfect round chapattis to win over a groom. You said the film was very autobiographical. So did you grow around the same issues and did your marriage to a non-Indian create waves?
No my marriage when it did happen, didn’t create waves, but yes my cousins and I definitely grew up battling the issues shown in the film. What I wanted to show was the fact that the community is not often what you think it is. There are very strong and strict fathers who say you must marry or I will break your legs, but as we move from generation to generation, both parents and the kids change and adapt. All of my three films share a lot in common. The South Asian community in England is a very strong community. It’s not just Indian, but a part of everything around it, so coming from Britain and West London gives you a very strong sense of who you are and where you are and that’s portrayed in my work. Britain is not cut off from other cultures; it’s an island and you are constantly coming into contact with every one else and remain part and parcel of everything that goes on cross culturally. In USA I get the feeling that Indians can live their whole life here and not connect with any other community.
Which was the toughest scene to shoot in the film?
Just the football scenes were tough. We worked very hard on it, we developed a separate camera casing, which allowed us to shoot from the ground along the grass from the goalie’s point of view, and that position made the girls look very strong and powerful.
How does it feel to be the only Indian woman filmmaker in the British film industry?
I consider myself more to be a British filmmaker and part and parcel of the rest of the British film industry. It is hard to make films no matter who you are. Finance is always a problem. I think the only thing different for me is the kind of stories I want to tell and I guess you have to work harder to convince people when you are working on stories that are not conventional or commercial, although after the success of Bend it Like Beckham I’m being considered one of the most commercially viable film makers that Britain has. It had nothing to do with being Indian or a woman, but because I made a film that made a lot of money. It’s made it easier now to get finance and today I can probably make any film I want.
How have you evolved as a filmmaker from the time you made Bhaji on the Beach to the blockbuster Bend it Like Beckham?
I think my sensibilities are still the same, but now I have more experience. I never went to film school, so it’s more about learning on the job and being more efficient with the film making process, which experience gives you.
I hear you are making Pride and Prejudice and Aishwarya Rai is the lead actress. How are you visualizing the adaptation of Jane Austen’s popular novel?
It will be like an international musical, part Fiddler on the Roof, part West Side Story and part Bollywood all rolled into one. It’s a big budget film and the hero will be an American actor so it will be an intercultural romance as well! We start shooting in July.
At the end of each movie what is of most value to you?
Bringing about an experience on screen and realizing that if I hadn’t done it no one else would.