Images of people like me

'Bend it Like Beckham' director Gurinder Chadha has a mission to change the media perception of Asians, writes Emma Brockes

In 1998, Gurinder Chadha sat down and thought, sod it - I'm not going to put up with this any more. She had already put up with it for five years. After making the film Bhaji on the Beach, the work had dried up and she had supported herself doing bits and pieces for television. She had been on breakfast telly and Gaytime TV; she had worked on a script about a Sri Lankan refugee family, but there wasn't exactly a stampede to finance it. She was too niche, or too ethnic. And so, at 37, after five fallow years, she sat down and thought, sod it - I'm going to write the most commercial movie I can with an Indian girl in the lead.

The success of Bend it Like Beckham, which grossed some $60 million (€50 million) in the US almost entirely by word of mouth, has changed Chadha's life, and not just to the extent that she has finally been approved for a mortgage. We order a huge meal in a curry house in Southall, west London, where she grew up and where she is staying at her mum's while editing her new film, Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood-style version of Jane Austen's novel in which the Bennetts are transformed into an Indian family from Amritsar. People at surrounding tables stare at Chadha and the manager bends double in his efforts to please. In this neighbourhood, she is a hero. "I always wanted to be more than what was expected of me as an Indian girl," she says and sends back a dish because it isn't hot enough. The manager gives her a free copy of the Good Curry Guide.

"Brilliant!" she shrieks, teasingly. "Now next time I'm in the Channel Islands or on the Isle of Wight I'll be able to find a good curry." The making of Bride and Prejudice required enormous feats of diplomacy. It was shot on three continents (although with a budget of only £12m, Chadha had to be inventive: for a hotel in Beverly Hills, read Stoke Poges golf club) and the cast came from three, very different acting traditions. "It was tough because every actor thought their way was best.

"The Americans thought Bollywood was very inferior. And the British actors thought they were better than the Americans. I felt like Russell Crowe in Master and Commander; it was my job to keep on course and I kept steering it with my map of British-Asian sensibility. What I've ended up with nods to Bollywood and to Hollywood and elements of it feel like the movie Grease. But it is actually a very British movie."

Chadha wants to make "joyful affectionate films" about the world that she comes from, because "I've seen a lot of dross about the Asian community. There's not a lot of people who do what I do, I feel, which is to celebrate and revel in their Indianness and their Englishness."

It wasn't always so. When she was growing up, the daughter of two shopkeepers who moved from India to Kenya and finally to London when she was a baby, she wasn't interested in being anything other than regular, i.e. not too Indian. She refused to have dance lessons ("I didn't want to be seen as this nice little girl doing Indian classical dance and all that shit") or watch any Bollywood films. As far as she could tell, India made life difficult; before he bought the shop, her father was a postman and a gasman and when he tried to get a job in Barclay's bank, she says they told him, "Sorry, we'd never hire someone with a turban."

At 18, she won a place to read development studies at university where she partied, cut her hair and permed it, and when her mother went mad, told her she had been forced to because of the split ends. "My mum said, 'everyone in India has long hair - they don't have split ends'. Then I put pink bits in it."

She imagined she would end up working for Oxfam, only it turned out that all the "dev" lecturers drove her mad. There was one, she says, who wore Indian clothes and always pronounced Indian place names with a phony Indian accent. "Tamil Nadu! It used to really get on my nerves. Most people were too right-on in 'dev' to find it funny. They were all so earnest. I was just angry all the time and I realised it was because they were taking people who looked like me and continually pushing them into the poverty category. That was their job, but it made me cross. Then I went to India for a year and read a dissertation about women in the media and something went off in my head; media, race awareness. So I wanted to create better images of people like me."

Twenty years later, Chadha finds herself, to her surprise, positioned as one of the most commercial film directors in Britain today. After college she worked as a radio journalist, which she abandoned because she found it "full of people being self-important about things that I didn't think really mattered", and then made a short film called I'm British But, with the help of the British Film Institute.

The images of "people like me" in the media still dissatisfy her. "There's a lot of people who like to take the mickey and do cheap comedy. And that's fine; have your gags, do all that. I wonder who she means when she refers to "cheap comedy". Does she, for example, admire the BBC2 comedy The Kumars at No 42? She grimaces. "Have some kebab," she says and bursts out laughing. Well? "Well, there's a school of thought that thinks that the Kumars are pure Uncle Tomism." She smiles again, luridly. "On the other hand, it's good that there's a comedy like that that gets high viewing figures and that people enjoy."

Bombay Dreams, the West End show based on Bollywood, was not her favourite production either; in fact, she thought it was, "terrible. An awful pastiche." Chadha and Meera Syal, the show's writer, fell out violently after making Bhaji on the Beach together. "The only elements that worked in Bombay Dreams were the ones done by hard-core Bollywood people, like the choreography."

In Bride and Prejudice, Chadha hopes she has paid affectionate (and knowledgeable) tribute to the genre. It frustrates her that western audiences can only identify with Bollywood as kitsch; actually, she says, if you understand the conventions, there is a lot more to it. "The majority of them are crap. But out of every 100, five are really good. And that's the same for Hollywood."

She shed her distaste for things Indian a long time ago and believes, now, that maintaining one's cultural differences is a good thing, if for no other reason than that it gives us all something to talk about.

Chadha's dad died five years ago and as she talks about him, she starts unexpectedly to cry. "Sorry," she says. "God. I didn't realise I was still so raw about it. I think part of it is that you talking to me is about me being successful and it's hard for me to measure success now, without him."

She cries and then laughs. "Oh God, this is really embarrassing." She laughs some more. Her father died in a freak accident, electrocuted in the garden while fiddling with the lawnmower. "Within half an hour he was dead," she says, wiping her eyes. "It was all really stupid. If he had been younger and stronger, he might have survived. And I've always thought he had a choice and his body said, either you can call it quits now or you can stay and be quite sick. And I think he probably thought, you know what? Fuck it, I'm off."

In another era, she says - for example, now, when "one is a lawyer first and then Asian, or a director first and then a woman and then Asian or whatever" - her father might have been a politician. He was hooked on news; read all the papers and watched current affairs TV programmes. He once met Tony Blair and after shaking his hand said to him, "if you come to power, how are you going to help Asian pensioners?' And Blair said," - she is crying with laughter again, "'Well, I will treat them the same as all pensioners.' My dad thought it was a good answer." Bend it Like Beckham is a tribute to him: "his capacity to be funny, I mean, hysterically funny, in tragic situations. He was a great philosopher."

Chadha says thatshe didn't realise until quite recently how much of the film was influenced by his death. "It had a profound effect on me. And it's sort of funny really; when he died, it was absolutely gut-wrenching . . . . When he died, there was this real sense of loss and tragedy, but at the same time, there was a sense of appreciation. It made me very impatient with people who throw life away. It was an epiphany. And I didn't know this at the time, but when I was making Beckham, I was totally grieving. That's why that film is so emotional and so raw, especially the scenes with the dad. It's a film that was made in grief."

Chadha is relaxed about her own future, particularly since going to an astrologer who told her two things. The first was, "you like your food". She laughs. "Ha! That's true. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai." And the second thing he said was that she was going to have a very long life: "very long and very peaceful. So now I don't fret about anything." And she laughs long and loud.