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Arts And Crafts
FULFILLINGEASTERNPROMISE
FULFILLINGEASTERNPROMISE
Writer and BAFTA Council member Ayub Khan-Din talks to Quentin Falk
Any resemblance between Ayub Khan-Din’s early life and his award-winning play (then bouquet-laden screenplay) East Is East is, of course, entirely uncoincidental.
There was the mixed marriage – an often scary Pakistan-born father, stoical white mother – a flock of chil- dren, the family chip shop in Salford, occasional visits to a cousin’s glitzy cinema in Bradford and end-
less domestic rows.
His dad’s own brief foray into films – as a lively extra in The Drum, Korda’s famous NorthWest Frontier adventure from the Thirties, remains, however, an unrecreated if fas- cinating flashback footnote.
People tend to assume
that Khan-Din, now 40, must
be the character of Saleem,
the art student son. In fact,
he’s little Sajid, the endearing-
ly stroppy, parka-hooded youngest of the embattled brood: “Yes, I used to behave like that,” he smiles.
That rarest of low budget British films, a success d’estime and a success de box office, East Is East has naturally been a major new “calling card” for Khan-Din, already an actor on stage and screen for some years.
With almost wide-eyed delight, he says: “It’s given me a whole new career. It’s amazing the people who want me to write their scripts or adapt their books, top production compa- nies... But I’m not, “he adds, firmly, “interested in being a writer-for-hire as such. I want to be involved through the whole process.”
To that end, he and his wife Buki – English mother, Nigerian father – have set up a production company “to do joint productions either with my own work or with a company that wants me to work for them.”
Having successfully sailed through the potentially choppy waters of ‘Second Play Syndrome’ with the
acclaimed Last Dance At Dum Dum, he presently has two film projects in development. And, no, not an East Is East sequel, he vows. Well, not with his involvement anyway.
With FilmFour, there’s the tongue-twisting Belmondoji, “a romantic comedy about an Indian guy who loves French films but has married into a nouveau riche family who are Bombay movie mad.”
For DNA Films, he’s adapting a book cryptically titled Slow Down Arthur, Stick To Thirty, “a kind of rites of passage story set around the turn of the Eighties. And no Asian connection.
“When they first sent it to me, I thought ‘there must be some Asians in here some- where,’ but as I read it I realised not so I asked them, jokingly, about that. They said, ‘We just like your writ- ing,” which was the best com- pliment I could get.”
It was, however, the ‘Asian connection’ that pro- vided perhaps the main
impetus for starting work on the first draft of East Is East while in his sec- ond year at drama school. That and the desire to capture his mother’s memories of turbulent family life before she progressed too far into her then diagnosed Alzeimer’s.
As Khan-Din writes in his no-non- sense Introduction to the published screenplay (Faber, £7.99): “I wanted to create a decent part for myself. I was fed up of seeing the crap stereotypical roles dished out to Asian actors: you either ran the corner shop or were the victim of skinheads.
“I had no idea after leaving drama school that I would suddenly be stamped with an invisible mark that said BLACK ACTOR! So, while most of my contemporaries went into rep, I had the added disadvantage of trying to
find a company that enforced integrated casting – I didn’t work for a year!”
He recalled one of his teachers suggesting he should change his name, so effectively ‘pass for white’:
‘I couldn’t do that; my name’s part of my identity and in fact it made me start using my middle name ‘Khan’ which for years I wouldn’t
use because I’d get the mickey taken out of me. You know the thing, Genghis Khan or Shere Khan.”
Uncompromised success did come eventually as an actor, on film in Sammy And Rosie Get Laid and TV in the serial London Bridge while all the time he would periodically re-visit
East Is East. It went through some six drafts and even an early screenplay version down the years before finally hitting the London stage in 1997. The rest is history.
There’s simply no time for acting now. There’s the writing and, among other important distractions, his work for BAFTA. After being co-opted on to the Film Committee “to chair
the odd jury” he was elected to full Council earlier this year.
“Why am I there? It’s not just because I’m half Pakistani and half English,” he states, adamantly. “I’m try- ing to involve more of the people I know who’ve been in the business a long time and who probably have felt up till now that they haven’t had any connection with BAFTA.” Fresh talent, he avers, “must be encouraged to join if BAFTA wishes to remain a relevant and vibrant institution.”
So has a black actor’s lot changed here significantly on, say, TV since he was first fired up to write?
Khan-Din ponders the question: “Not much. You were in it because there was a racial or cultural bent in the episode. That changed a bit with London Bridge which probably had more brown and black faces than any other soap or series in years. We were there just as characters.
“Let’s hope that now happens more and more. We’re not just always getting beaten up by skinheads, or daughters having problems about getting married.” ■
Photos main: Ayub Khan-Din (standing) with East Is East director Damien O’Donnell and scenes from East Is East
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