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KINDHEARTSAND CHILLICHUTNEY
GURINDER CHADHA’S BACK WITH IT’S A WONDERFUL AFTERLIFE, A WEST LONDON TALE OF THE QUITE UNEXPECTED...
t began as a “full-on horror film” to Ibe called My Bloody Wedding. But
then, as Gurinder Chadha and her regular writing partner husband Paul Mayeda Berges progressed
with their script, matters started to take a rather gentler turn.
“In the end,” said Chadha, “ it became much more of a morality tale about how you live your life and about re-incarnation, also how as Indians we look at death.”
The result is It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, Chadha’s sixth feature, which she described as “a supernatural or even spiritual comedy.” Back on her home patch in West London after she moved to the South Coast for her previous film, Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging, Chadha’s latest tells of a loving Indian mum Mrs Sethi whose match-making efforts turn deadly when she tries to marry off her daughter Roopie.
Chadha has, as ever, assembled a seriously cosmopolitan cast including Shabana Azmi, Sally Hawkins, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Jimi Mistry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Zoe Wanamaker and Mark Addy as well as cast talented newcomer Goldy Notay in the crucial role of the bemused Roopie.
She admitted that ever since the huge success of Bend It Like Beckham, she’s been “under a lot of pressure from, in particular, an Asian crowd to deliver another British-Asian feelgood movie in the same vein. However I didn’t just want to repeat myself and do that again. But it was then a question of finding something which Indians are concerned about but try and tackle it in a completely original genre.”
At her side again was cinematographer Dick Pope BSC with whom she had worked for the first time on Angus, Thongs, a teen rom-com.
He really had his work cut out this time round because there’s also an important ghostly effects element to the film.
Said Pope: “When Gurinder sent me the script I had, coincidentally, just seen a restored print of David Lean’s 1945 Blithe Spirit – she had, too – and it became a sort of kicking-off point in
our dialogue about the film. I’d loved what they did with the spirits in it: very simple but very effective. It was really low-tech but somehow it worked and was quite magical.
“This film was very challenging because in almost every scene I had to deal with each character as well as sometimes five spirits – hardly a single scene was ever just a two- or three-hander – which is why I chose the widescreen format basically to frame all those characters that were in most scenes.”
Chadha had nothing but praise for Pope, some years her senior. “Despite his age and experience, he’s not at all jaded or, like, done-that, been-there.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite and it’s infectious. He still gets so excited by lighting and never backs off when given a challenge.
He was, he admits, rather less delighted at the prospect of filming the Alien-style opening. “I had,” he said mysteriously, “to confront my demons to be on that set at all let alone photograph the scene.”.
As for that Carrie-style climax in which gallons of chilli chutney do stout service?
Said the tireless Chadha, who is already hard at work on her next project - a serious drama set during the time of Partition in India: “ I’d successfully done two Indian wedding scenes in the past and was rather sad at the thought I’d never be able to
do another one because I’d just be repeating myself.
“The only way I could do one was to subvert it and that’s when I had the idea of doing this big wedding scene and turning it into Carrie. I almost ended up building the whole film around that scene. Also the idea of having women there like my mum mademereallylaugh.” QUENTINFALK
It’s A Wonderful Afterlife, on release later this month, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 500T 8547, ETERNA 500T 8573 and ETERNA 250T 8553
THE DP VIEW
DICK POPE BSC
The front part of the film has quite a de-saturated, de-coloured look but as the film progresses it gets
“more and more colourful so by the end, for its denouement if you like, it’s really vibrant,withfully enrichedcolour.
To get that I was really lucky because I had this conversation with Millie Morrow at Fujfilm about the new ETERNA Vivid 500T which was still in Japan and hadn’t come out yet in the UK. She asked me how much I needed and I told her enough to do this really big scene at the end of the film when it all takes off.
I was lighting the finale – we got to the scene almost at the end of the schedule -when a test roll arrived. I banged it in the camera, did a simple test and it went to the lab where
I then saw it on the screen as a print before work.
It was absolutely perfect for the scene, for which much of the time we had three cameras running. I lit it in such a way we could see it in 360 degree and we also shot in slo-mo, very slo-mo. It was as if the Vivid was made for it – a riot of colour.
In the last issue of EXPOSURE my good friend Benoit Delhomme said how he felt the new Vivid was designed especially for him.
I absolutely insist [he laughed] that it was made specifically for me!
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FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 31