Gurinder Chadha
Gurinder Chadha
Gurinder Chadha OBEis an English film director of Punjabi Sikh Kenyan Asian origin. Most of her films explore the lives of Indians living in England. This common theme among her work showcases the trials of Indian women living in England and how they must reconcile their converging traditional and modern cultures. Although many of her films seem like simple quirky comedies about Indian women, they actually address many social and emotional issues, especially ones faced by immigrants caught between two...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth10 January 1960
CityNairobi, Kenya
add except happened inclined less people pictures telling
The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.
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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.
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You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.
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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.
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I went to my local pub to watch the games and was amazed to see grown men crying when England were out of the cup. I'd only ever seen the country like this when Lady Diana died. I had got the football bug and thought wouldn't it be great to take all this energy, and put two girls in the middle of it all?
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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.
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If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.
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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.
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'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.
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'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.
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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.
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We were delighted to find out that here was someone in the US who was exploring the same themes as us, in terms of diaspora, culture, cultural negotiations and identity.
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We thought we'd need a few extra police because of the crowds that wanted to see her,
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There are very few people who are Asian who have the kind of global reach that I have, not just with Asians but with non-Asians. I've worked hard for what my name represents, my brand, not just in Britain but around the world.