Top 35 Gurinder Chadha Quotes

When you’re told that as a filmmaker of colour, the stories you want to tell aren’t commercial enough, then you start thinking, ‘I’m going to tell them anyway.’

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.

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.

Constantly, I’ve been asked to make a sequel to ‘Beckham.’ However, I thought a West End show was the proper way to go. Once we made the show, I wanted to make sure that I embraced the West End genre rather than just put the film on stage.

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 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.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

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.

DVDs have their place, but the cinema is a tangible, emotional experience that I would hate my children not to have.

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.

Once I started writing the screenplay of ‘Bride & Prejudice,’ I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.

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.

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.

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

The great thing about musicals is that they transcend race.

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’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.

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

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.

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.

The fact that it’s hard to create an original British musical doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

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.

I’m absolutely delighted because I’m part of the process that has made Asians very much part of the mainstream fabric of Britain, whereas, when I first started, we were completely on the margin.

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.

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.

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 am not afraid to be a pioneer. When a door is ajar, you need to open it fully. And once you are in that room, you need to see what other doors there might be and where they might lead.

‘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.

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there’s this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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