Page 9 - Fujifilm Exposure_27 Bride & Prejudice_ok

seemed to fall apart. There were cer- tain plans to resurrect it, but it some- how just never happened.
“Paul and I then went to the States to make What’s Cooking? After we’d finished the film, Cameron McCracken at Pathe Films kept saying to us, ‘you’ve got to do a Bollywood film’ and I’d reply, ‘no no, done that bit...’
“At the time there were a number of projects out there which were a bit upsetting to me because they all seemed to be taking the mickey or being a bit superior, only focusing on the kitsch.
“Okay, there’s a lot in Bollywood that’s not good but as far as I’m con- cerned my relationship with it is rather different. For example, I have a lot of affection for some of the truly great Bollywood directors.
music by President Award-winner Anu Malik, lyrics from the famous Akhtar family and choreography by the emi- nent Saroj Khan.
On hand as Chadha’s cinematogra- pher is 43-year-old Santosh Sivan, also an award-winning director in his own right with films like the Hindi spectac- ular, Asoka, and the disturbing, low-
budget Tamil drama, The Terrorist.
Her idea of making a Bollywood-style film has its roots not just in Chadha’s background and upbringing but also in a project which went, she recalled, “horri- bly wrong” about seven years ago.
“I’d wanted to make the first British Bollywood movie and an Indian producer-cum-star had wanted me to
do it for him. He gave us the money for a script and we wrote what was, in my opinion, a cracking script, an origi- nal, set entirely in England.
“We started working on it but soon discovered that the way people work in India is very different to what we’re used to here. We did about four weeks’ shooting and then it all just
“Anyway Cameron kept badgering me, saying things like, ‘you have to do it because you’ll do it properly.’ I told him that we couldn’t go back to the script Paul and I had written before and that anyway I didn’t want to do something everyone else was doing.”
Then the Austen lightning struck, and she and Paul made a deal with
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