My Beautiful Laundrette: Soap Opera

When Hanif Kureishi’s script arrived through my letterbox, I wanted to shoot it right away. I’d made Walter, the film that was screened on the first night of Channel 4, and was all in favour of the fact that it was originally to be made for TV. Who in their right mind was going to go to the cinema to see a film about a gay Pakistani running a launderette? ...

Back then, if you’d asked me what was important about the film, I’d have said economics, since the homosexual element was really quite straightforward. It was the first time jokes about Mrs Thatcher had been made in the cinema and they got huge laughs [Really? In 1985! FB]. The film ended up being a big cinema hit and changed the lives of everyone involved. There was a reunion recently and the wonderful thing was that we were all there. Nobody had died.

Director Stephen Frears remembers making My Beautiful Laundrette in The Guardian.

The film is being shown at the BFI, London, on December 15th with a Q&A with Stephen Frears and Gordon Warnecke. Details of other UK screenings are here.

Thought For The Day: Hanif Kureishi

At home, in Bromley, the family hinterland had no relevance or meaning. Here, he was just "a Paki". Then came Enoch Powell and the "rivers of blood" speech. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "We thought we were going to be sent back. We'd been brought over here to help run the NHS and the public services, but now we realised that we were just Pakis and niggers. There were a lot of skinheads. My dad was persecuted as he came home from work and he thought it was all too difficult. But I liked my name. I couldn't change it to Pete Brown. So what I had to do," he continues, "was uncover who I really was. You saw that a lot in the 70s: blacks, gays, women. It all came out of EP Thompson [author of The Making of the English Working Class)] and the idea that ordinary people have their own history."

Hanif Kureishi interviewed in The Observer.

You can read The Making Of The English Working Class online here.