11/11/2022 0 Comments Bruce springsteen blinded by the light( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Nick Wall) My dad never got to see the book, so when Bruce told me that he liked the book, it was the closest validation I could get in my life to my dad telling me that he liked it.Director Gurinder Chadha describes Blinded by the Light as the "spiritual companion" to her 2002 film Bend it like Beckham. The speech at the end is actually me talking to my dad, saying all of the things I wanted to say to him but couldn’t. Writing the book was me trying to process him and humanize him and understand him. What that basically means is… he never saw anything that I achieved. He died in the week that my very first article was published. He died in the beginning of June, three days before I turned 24. Your dad’s had a heart attack.” I take a drive down - and this is May of 1995 - and my dad’s had a heart attack, and he’s in a coma for a week. Over six years later, in 1995, I’m living in Manchester, and I get a call saying, “Come back home. My book, Greetings From Bury Park, is about Bruce, but it’s also about my dad. So by 2010, he knew me enough to recognize me. Manzoor: I’d met Bruce a bunch of times, but only outside of hotels and outside venues. Sarfraz, what was it like finding out that Bruce Springsteen had read your book? , he got up, gave me a kiss and a hug, and we sat down and talked about the film for an hour. I wasn’t sure how he was going to feel about that. I did start thinking about how I had taken his music and set it against England. But there are things that he might not like, like how I’ve used his songs on an English landscape. Inside I thought, I don’t think he won’t like it, because every decision I’ve made has been for him. What was it like watching him watch your film and waiting for his reaction?Ĭhadha: Being in that room waiting for him was very nerve-racking. Gurinder, I heard a story that when the film was finished, you screened it for Bruce in private. I said, how am I going to make the audience feel what it’s like when you hear something for the first time? I used sounds, I used pictures, words, music, projections of US landscapes and hurricanes, lots of wind machines. For me, it was just listening to the lyrics and visualizing them and putting Javed in the middle of that. Some of the more spectacular moments in the film are the visualizations of Javed’s discovery of Bruce’s music.Ĭhadha: As a director, I’m very proud of those sequences. And when you’re a kid, all you want to do is belong, isn’t it? It wasn’t just mainstream white society saying that there was a question mark on my right to belong. What was interesting was to get that from both sides. We had people saying that if I didn’t support the right team, I wasn’t a part of their country. Then, I also had that coming in from wider society. Be grateful and proud that you’re Pakistani and you’re not British.” He was a first-generation immigrant, and he really, really wanted me to hold on to that cultural identity. My dad would say to me, “You’re Pakistani. Manzoor: The interesting thing is that when I was growing up, I was told that I wasn’t British by my parents and some people outside. We’re all working and living in such hybrid cities, where you wouldn’t even notice half of the cultural processes going on. I’m British, I’m Indian, I’m married to an American who’s Japanese. Was that difficult to portray as a storyteller?Ĭhadha: No, because that was my life, too. Javed is negotiating three cultures in Blinded by the Light –- Pakistani, British, and American. I believed that, in America, you’re born with two identities: The one you have, and “American”. The America stuff…When I was growing up, genuinely, I loved John Hughes’ films. The dad’s basically my dad, the mum’s basically my mum. I was doing a lot of the personal stuff - the family dynamics, the character of Javed - that’s all pretty much me. I spent, like, five years working on the script, and Gurinder… did work on it as well a political dimension. Sarfraz, as a teenager, were you as fascinated with America as Javed is in this film? That’s the beauty of cinema - that you can take a culturally specific story, but if you make it with honesty and integrity, it will always be universal. I’m not Japanese, but that film is so touching and moving in so many ways. You just see how everyone is the same and generally react to the same things in the film. Part of that is of dads and sons not really talking to each other, and that’s true here in the US as well. Blinded by the Light is culturally and geographically specific and yet has had a warm reception from people around the world.Ĭhadha: It’s a real pleasure sharing the film with audiences around the world because people all see it very differently We just came from Ireland, and it was very emotional.
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