Gurinder Chadha quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.

  • Australians have a fantastic sense of humour and incredible taste. I was there for 'Bend It Like Beckham,' and I had a great time. Aussies loved it, and I think 'Bride & Prejudice' is going to do well, too, because it's all about having a good time.

  • Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

  • What's amazing about 'Desi Rascals' is that once you get over the all-Asian cast, what it seems to be mainly about is what everyone else is concerned about. Young people. Getting off with each other. Being embarrassed by your parents. Being hurt by romance. You'll watch it because it is entertaining, because it is moving, not because it is Asian.

  • One of the best things about the award season is that when a British film succeeds at the Oscars and BAFTAs, such as 'Slumdog Millionaire' in 2009 and 'The King's Speech' this year, the British public get right behind it with an immense sense of national pride.

  • Our films have the ability to tell global audiences who we are, and this is something the government should feel compelled to protect. My film, 'Bend it Like Beckham,' for example, would not have been made without the backing and support of the U.K. Film Council.

  • My films do have a big following among young girls, and I want to instill confidence in them, a sense of self-appreciation - to make them feel they can be spirited and say what they feel.

  • Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.

  • I've been wanting for a long time to create a show which allowed me to show the British Asian community in a truly three-dimensional way, exploring the relationships between generations and what it means to be British and Asian as values become fluid.

  • I was a journalist when I made 'I'm British But...' I'd seen how important the media was in terms of defining Indians - after the riots in the '80s, I was like, 'Oh my God!'

  • Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.

  • As I grew up, I always refused to cook Indian food very vehemently, and to this day, I don't cook chapatis at home. I'd always say, 'Why do I have to do it? Why don't the men do it?'

  • Third-generation Indians love maintaining their cultural traditions, but they can also go down the pub, shop till they drop, do whatever anyone else does.

  • If you want to be a director, work with writers and find different ways of telling stories with film, then do a course. This way you can consolidate what you've learnt and use the course to go further.

  • One of the things I want to do with 'Desi Rascals' is go a bit deeper into the characters and their family lives and have a bit more heart and a bit more inter-generational story-telling, so it's not all about young people.

  • It's not simply that British films do well at the box office and generate revenue, it's that they provide a window to the world of what Britain and its culture is about.

  • Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.

  • For British cinema to survive, you really need a British film culture, and it's got to start down there, with young kids watching films in the cinema - so they can be transported to a different world.

  • I love 'I'm British But...' It's such a sweet, innocent, open-hearted film, and it has the sort of openness that I still aspire to with everything I do. It wears its heart, head, everything on its sleeve.

  • I went to L.A., and I was on two different studio movies at Fox and Sony, but they were never made in the end. When the second one wasn't happening, I ended up doing an episode of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for the BBC, and went on a roots trip from England to Kenya, India, and pre-partition India in Pakistan, where my family originally came from.

  • All my films are about kind of being seen to be one thing when you're actually something else, and the power of the female spirit to make things work your way on your terms. Which is what I do.

  • I was a good Indian girl, but naughty in that I would often sneak out of the back door and into the garden and go off with my friends when I should have been at home cooking or cleaning.

  • I saw 'Billy Elliot' again, and what I loved about it was the way it had become a social document, a reminder of what happened with the mining communities in the '80s. And I thought, 'Everyone keeps wanting me to make a sequel to 'Beckham,' but maybe a musical remake is the answer, embracing all this theatricality.'

  • I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

  • I can't stand films where parents are portrayed as old and doddery, and ignore their kids.

  • One of the head guys at Disney categorically said to me, 'We don't want to make children's films any more. We want to make films that are going to appeal to all quadrants.' Hence you have films like 'Shrek' and all the Pixar stuff, which is designed to suit everybody.

  • I use humour a lot because humour is a great equaliser. Everyone laughs at the same things if you set them up properly, and that makes everybody equal. At the end of the day, I see my job as being there to entertain as well as inform and provoke.

  • Southall Broadway, in west London, has been a constant part of my life from the day I arrived in England as a baby from Kenya in 1962. My parents rented a room in one of the terraces off the Broadway, and I've seen it change from an ordinary English high street to what is now 'Little India.' with a confident Asian community.

  • My pregnancy was great, but the last three weeks were manic because my blood pressure was going up and up.

  • I remember a picture on the front page of the 'Sun' during the Brixton riots: a rasta guy with a petrol bomb, and a headline saying something like: 'The Future of Britain.' And I thought: 'Wow! Look at the power of that image,' and I wanted to get behind the camera to make these people three-dimensional.

  • Indian films never show cows. When you go to India, the most noticeable thing is the cows. Everywhere you look, there's cows walking around! Just by introducing the idea of animals - livestock walking around - suddenly makes it more real.

  • I knew from an early age that people didn't see the different sides of me. I formulated a kind of bi-cultural identity quite early, and I was always very comfortable with it, but I knew people didn't quite see that.

  • I know it sounds really weedy, but we are all children who seek approval from our parents.

  • After 'Bhaji On The Beach', I didn't make a movie for six years. I couldn't get a movie off the ground for love nor money. It was a very tough time and I almost gave up. If I had been an Oxbridge bloke after 'Bhaji', my career would have been very different

  • Well, I think there was a time when I first started that there was such a thing called 'a woman's film' and there were certain scripts that women would make. But I think that's changed a lot now. I think that if a woman director walks into a room with a script, it doesn't really matter what the subject matter is, or the genre is, so long as the financiers feel that the woman has the skills to make the film

  • It is hard directing. The hours are terrible and you have to sort of suspend your life when you're in production. So, being a mother is very hard. I can absolutely see why there are so few women directing, because it's physically a very demanding thing to do. Fathers can only do it because they have wives at home doing all the other stuff. I can only do it because I have a husband that helps with the kids at home

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share