Gurinder Chada and Sarfraz Manzoor Interview: Blinded by the Light

DHK: I would love to know what the most memorable birthday gift you remember receiving is? That’s not a journal.

SM: So here’s the thing, in real life, my real life was worse than the one you saw in the film. I actually never got any birthday presents when I was a kid growing up.

DHK: Oh no!

SM: Yeah, we never got birthday presents, we never had any holidays, and to be honest birthday presents weren’t quite so bad. But we never got any Christmas presents because we didn’t celebrate Christmas, which was really awful. Because during the week before Christmas holidays at school, all the kids would bring in the presents they had been given by their parents. And so then you’d be allowed to play with those presents at school because it was like the week before Christmas. And I never got any Christmas presents, so I had to kind of like sit there without presents, and sometimes someone would let me borrow one of theirs or whatever. But I felt really self conscious. I remember that being quite a dark, quite a sad moment. 

But we just didn’t have any money and they never really marked my birthday particularly. I remember one time my mum bought me a pair of trousers, but they were really itchy. They were made of what looked like rice sacks or something. And I put them on, I think it was for my eighth birthday and I just couldn’t keep them on because they just itched my legs too much. My mum had a real raw go at me because she was like “we actually got you a present and you can’t even put them on?” and I’m like “It’s unbearably itchy.”

So I don’t have any memorable birthday presents because I never really got any when I was a kid. And in adulthood that’s been slightly different obviously.

DHK: I’ll follow it up then, was there something as a kid that you just wished you had. That one thing you coveted?

SM: Oh my god. A computer. Oh my god. If you look at my diary I was obsessed with getting a computer. Because all my friends had them. And this is back in the day with Commodore 64s and you know Ataris. And I remember telling my dad “I really need to get a computer because that’s where all the work is going to come from in the future. If you can give me that now, I’ll be able to be employable in the future!”

And in my diary I remember writing “I just really worry because I’m going to be so far behind everyone who has got a computer I’m never going to be able to find any work.” So I was really obsessed with getting a computer.

DHK: Wow you were really ahead of the curve. 

SM: Should I tell you something very sad? There was a magazine called Personal Computer World, and there was this computer called the Acorn Electron. Which is actually in the film, I mention it in the script and the film. And there was one edition of the Personal Computer World which had this massive photograph of the Acorn Electron as it’s cover. And I remember buying it and using it as a sort of computer. Like hacking on the picture of the keyboard as if it was a real keyboard.

DHK: This has taken a dark turn (laughing). I’m going to assume you got a computer eventually so it has a happy ending! So the film is a fictionalization, so what in this film is the thing you wish actually had happened to you, the most?

SM: Well I wish Eliza was real. Because basically I was kind of invisible to girls when I was that age. And when we were making the film we were like we have to give this guy a girlfriend. Otherwise it would just be unfair on the poor sod. So we gave him a girlfriend. That would have really livened my life up if I’d had that.

DHK: So what was the biggest change from the original version of the script to the version we see onscreen?

SM: There were loads. To be honest I started working on the script around 2010. And we sent it to Bruce (Springsteen) around 2017. So that’s 7 years, do you know what I mean? There’s a lot of different things that happened.

Part of it is just length. There was just loads that we just couldn’t in the end, we even filmed it but weren’t able to use. It’s also about the clarity of the story. You know like there were things I really wanted to put in, but for example I would have liked to have more with me and Roops. That buddy stuff was really something that was fun, but ultimately it just kind of gets in the way of the story. 

So it wasn’t really anything, it was more to the matter of trying to keep it as tight to the story so it moves along as fast as possible. Which meant that we had to lose things. 

One thing that did change over time was the idea of becoming more of a musical moment. You know the big moments where they sing “Born to Run”. That was a more recent thing, it was much more of a straighter film. But Gurinder made a really good point, if you’re going to watch this in the cinema, it might be fun to have these moments to be bigger. So they feel like they’re more cinematic moments. That was something that was a big change.

DHK: So how do you strike the balance, because you as you mentioned the film has been in development for quite some time, but there have been a slate of films recently that are musically inclined. They all have their spin on the balance of music vs plot vs drama, what was the discussion like on which moments to punctuate with those musical bits?

SM: That’s a really good question. For me part of it was, in the end Gurinder was the filmmaker, so she was the one who made the decisions on all of these things. But we discussed it, ultimately it was her call. I think the thing I would have been a bit nervous about, was I always wanted it to feel like it was rooted in the real. 

Think about the film, even when there is music playing, even on something as ridiculous as the “Thunder Road” moment, there is a headphone there. There is some speaker there or something. People are singing along to someone.

DHK: It’s diegetic technically. 

SM: What’s that?

DHK: Oh it’s when a sound can be attributed to a source onscreen. 

SM: That’s a word I didn’t know until now but It’s exactly that, so it doesn’t feel like it’s completely hyper real. For me that was important. I wanted people to care about the character, and I feel if they’d just leapt into song every five minutes you’d maybe stop feeling they were real people.

DHK: So I’m curious, “Blinded by the Light” is a very specific era of Springsteen music, “Greetings from Asbury Park” etc. but what Springsteen song would represent your life now?

SM: Wow, that is a heck of a question. Well you know what, at t
he moment things are pretty good. So there’s a song on “Lucky Town” called “Better Days” – basically the chorus is “these are better days.”

There’s also a song on “Working on a Dream” called “My Lucky Day” – basically things are quite good right now. I’m only saying that because they’ve been bad other times, and I might as well enjoy the moment when I can. 

I would say the more upbeat songs like “Better Days” and “My Lucky Day” – those are the ones that sort of feel like that.

The other thing is that I’m really lucky, I married someone who is incredible and I’ve got two little kids. And so I feel like the songs which are about love in that kind of way, they also kind of speak to me now.

There’s a song called “Long Time Coming” which is about parenthood, it’s about having a kid when you’ve been wanting one for a long time. He’s got this line in it where “If I’ve got one wish in this world” to his kids he’s saying “it’s let your mistakes be your own.”

I’ve got two kids who are 7 and 2, and I sometimes think about that. About not letting my issues and my hang-ups infect their personalities. Letting them just be themselves, that sort of thing.

DHK: Do you remember a time you felt represented on screen?

SM: No to be honest. If you mean ethnically, if you mean color wise, no. If you mean class wise, no. It’s been like that for so long that I’ve never even expected it, kind of, do you know what I mean?

I tell you what, I love Philip Roth, and I love Woody Allen, I kind of felt like I was represented in Annie Hall because that’s the kind of world of ideas and jokes and things that I like. Even though it’s obviously not set in Luton.

I found representation through sensibility, rather than people who look like me.

The crazy thing is, when I was a kid, I had not dreams, but fantasies about what it would be like to be an actor or a star. It was like I used to, we used to think the closest anyone could be for someone who looked like me was… do you remember CHiPs? 

DHK: Yep! With Erik Estrada?!

SM: I was thinking maybe Erik Estrada was Indian. Maybe we could do a reboot of CHiPs and I could be him or something. There was literally no one who looked like me on screen, in any way in terms of anything glamourous.

And then later there became like there were, but they were always put upon, and they were always, like, stock joke characters or whatever. So to be in this moment now, when you’ve got a film like Yesterday, and then you’ve got this film, and then you’ve got David Copperfield coming out soon with Dev Patel playing David Copperfield.

What I really feel is “what must it like to be 16 NOW and from my kind of background and see this kind of representation?” I mean it must just be a leap from the kind of world I grew up in.

DHK: I’m curious, how do you define personal success now, and has that definition changed from when you were younger?

SM: God these are really good questions, man alive! (Laughs)

DHK: Thank you?
SM: I feel they’re slightly therapy like, but I quite like that. I’ll be honest with you. What it feels like, it’s very hard to put it into words. My dad died when I was 23, and he did not leave any paper trace from his existence. There were no letters, there’s nothing. And as a writer, as a storyteller, I’m really fascinated to know what type of guy he is. I never asked him and I never found out. I’ve got two kids, and one of the reasons I am so pathological about writing about myself, I write so many first person pieces in The Guardian, and I wrote a memoir, and I’ve been involved in this film… It’s partly a way of saying to them “I exist, and I existed” and it’s partly a way of preserving my story beyond me, in that my dad’s story did not last beyond him.

After I wrote my book I thought “you know what, if anyone wants to know who I was, this book is going to exist.” I feel that even more with this film. I just feel like you don’t know me from Adam, but you now know that my dad worked in a car factory, and that I like Bruce, and that my mum worked, and those things. 

I think by making those stories and making that truth visible to a large audience, it makes me feel like even if I do nothing else, I’ve done enough.

DHK: Slightly left field: growing up, who was your favorite fictional character?

SM: Tom Sawyer, because I loved the idea of an idealized childhood, and there was a program called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and I remember just like being on the Mississippi, and having Huckleberry Finn as a mate, and playing, and hanging out in the field. It just seemed like a very carefree, charmed, innocent time. I aspired to have that kind of childhood.

DHK: Ok so my very last question is, what is your best in person Bruce Springsteen story?

SM: Well I’ll give you one. So basically I was in Pittsburgh, and I’d flown over from London to Pittsburgh to see him in concert. I had a ticket for like the second row. I’m sitting there listening to him singing. He was running from one side of the stage to the other, and he’s singing – I think he’s singing “Out in the Streets” and he’s running towards my side and sort of randomly pointing at people. Then he spots me in the audience and just out of nowhere, and in front of 18,000 people he stops and says “What are you doing in Pittsburgh?!”

DHK: I’m secretly hoping you had a Courtney Cox moment and got pulled on stage. 

SM: I think I’m the wrong gender and not sufficiently attractive (laughs).

DHK: I’m going to start off with what the most memorable birthday gift you remember receiving is?

GC: Birthday gift? Oh yeah cause of that scene? (Laughs) Well actually my husband got me Bruce’s autobiography for my birthday. That was pretty neat. I got a pretty beautiful chain with pictures of my kids on it when they were babies, that was pretty nice. 

DHK: Logistically or emotionally what was the most challenging scene?

GC: The most challenging thing for the whole movie was I had the responsibility of taking of Bruce’s music and legacy (pre-1987). I had that at my disposal. That gave me a massive responsibility to do the right thing by him. 

This is a film about a writer, and so writing itself – how do you make that cinematic. Also I didn’t want to do a jukebox musical, I wanted to make a film where the music was endemic and part of the narrative of Javed. And so I sort of sat down with all the songs and all the lyrics and poured over them all and made them part of the script. So it felt like all the songs I used, I had used them for the film, for me, and not for Bruce. They didn’t exist before for Bruce, he wrote them for me and my film. So I had to kind of do that, but at the same time I was always under pressure for “will Bruce like this, will Bruce not like this?” and you imagine the pressure of taking “Born to Run” and putting that in a movie. How are you going to picturize that? His anthem. When you’re dealing with depressed Luton in the 80s. 

There was a lot of pressure in making his music feel relevant, and cinematic, and feeling like Javed’s story – but also works for his millions of fans all over the world.

DHK: What was it like striking the balance between the musical – because you said you didn’t want it to be a jukebox musical – but you do have these diegetic musical moments. How did you find that flow? 

GC: I just think I did it through instinct really. I made the songs work where I needed them to work. I chose about six big songs I needed to picturize and do well: “Dancing in the Dark”, “Promised Land”, “Thunder Road”, “Born to Run”, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, and “The River.” These were the big songs. And then “Hungry Heart” was another one of the key songs. Between that I had smaller snippets of other songs. “Prove it all Night” is for the love story.

I kind of chose a selection of ten I needed to work for my script, and for the film filmically. So the way I did “Prove it all Night” for example, I choreographed the song and lyrics to the dialogue and action that was going on. It was carefully plotted so you have the right amount dialogue in between where the song starts and the romantic bit I wanted Javed to sing to her. It’s very technical what I was doing.

I used to work in radio so I kind of use sound and music in a different way because of my expertise in radio. A lot of the music I had choreographed – I don’t mean in a dancing way, I mean choreographed the sound – to make it work with the pictures and the sentiment. 

DHK: Who was the soundtrack of your childhood/youth?

GC: Obviously Bruce was important to me, I started listening to him when I was a child at school. But there were a few bands that really rocked me at just the right time. That was The Specials, The Clash, and The Jam. Those bands I remember going “WOW” those are amazing.

And funnily enough when Public Enemy came along, I remember going to see them in Camden in a little venue in London. Like small venue, it was packed and going “Fight the power! Fight the power!” (Laughs).

DHK: Was not the answer I was expecting!

GC: I mean when Public Enemy burst on the scene it was like “jeez, what’s happened?!” sitting in London watching them chant “Fight the power!” was pretty amazing.

DHK: Did you have any great acts of teenage rebellion?

GC: I did put pink streaks in my hair once (laughs).

DHK: How was the reaction to that?

GC: Well what happened was I put bleached streaks and then I made it pink. My parents just thought I was mad. But then I went on a gap year to India and was staying with lots of very conservative relatives who really thought I was peculiar, and a punk rocker maybe? Although it was much later than punk.

Although what I then kept trying to do in India was take all the color out and make it normal (laughs).

DHK: A short lived rebellion.

GC: Very short lived and not very rebellious at all I think.

DHK: How do you define personal success now and has that changed since when you were longer?

GC: Well I struggled for a long time with my own success, because sadly my dad died before Bend it like Beckham, so he never really saw, he never saw that great success that that film was. He died just before I made the film, and therefore the film is very grief ridden. I was making the film in grief for my dad. And when you watch the film now you’ll see, it’s very raw, the whole daughter-father relationship. I can see it when I watch it back, you know? It’s just me desperately missing my dad. And so for the longest time I didn’t really value my own success, because my dad wasn’t there to share it. 

Then a few years ago when I made Viceroy’s House I was in India and there was a big scene in a refugee camp, with like a thousand extras. I was walking through the set with my son, who would have been about eight at the time, and he said to me – oh by the way my son is the little kid who plays Javed in the film – at the beginning, yeah that’s my son. 

I was walking through this set in India and he said “Mom it’s so hot, it’s so dirty, why are we here, why can’t we just go home?” I explained to him this film is very important son, it’s about my grandmother being in a refugee camp during the partition of India when India got independence. If I don’t tell these stories, I don’t know who’s going to tell that history of our family.

Then he turns to me and he went “Good for you!” (Laughs) and he gave me a big hug. And in that moment he changed everything for me. Sudden
ly I didn’t miss my dad anymore, and like, my son just completely validated everything for me. So that was a really beautiful moment for me. So now my children, whenever I have successes or failures, they’ve always got their own opinions. 

DHK: I’m sure as children are wont to do, they share those opinions whether or not you want them to.

GC: Yep, “Don’t do that mum!” “Make a nice film, people don’t want to hear problems!” (laughs).

DHK: My last question is, growing up who was your favorite fictional character.

GC: Oh well that’s easy, I don’t know if you’ll have heard of her. But growing up there were these books about a character called Millie Molly Mandy. She was this little English girl and her best friend was called Suzie. Where she lived, was this little quaint English town, they had a meadow next door and Millie Molly Mandy and Suzie used to go to the meadow next door and eat thickly sliced bread with butter and jam. I used to fantasize about that. I was forever having sliced bread with butter and jam and sitting in my garden and pretending I was like Millie Molly Mandy sitting in a meadow.

That was the first character I remember going wow. It was the perfect English sort of story and adventures with girls. It left an impact of a perfect version of Englishness and the countryside. 

I’m talking really young, I was about six or seven.

DHK: Thank you so much congrats on the film!