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To begin with, Gurinder Chadha was wandering through the Charles Dickens Museum in London, trying to commune with the author’s spirit. “If you were alive today,” the film-maker asked him, “what story would you tell?” And, she wondered in the same breath: “What can I bring as my own vision to this wonderful story of yours?”
While Dickens’s ghost didn’t materialise, she found her answers and, during lockdown, wrote her own version of his ghost story A Christmas Carol. Giving it the title Christmas Karma, the 65-year-old Londoner has created an energetic, flamboyant musical film starring The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar as Mr Sood – her modern-day Scrooge – alongside Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The rest of the cast is stacked like decorations on a Norway spruce, with Hugh Bonneville, Danny Dyer and Pixie Lott further illuminating proceedings.
With the kind of coincidence Dickens revelled in, the film-maker switched on the TV news to find inspiration for the miser who drains the joy from everyone around him. “There’s an interesting phenomenon of Asians in the Tory party empowered by taking a hard rightwing stance,” Chadha says. “In a way it’s them wanting to be accepted more – which is kind of what my Scrooge does. He thinks money will give him status and protect him. People would ask me to come and support them, and I would say: ‘No, I can’t. Even though you’re an Asian woman and I’m an Asian woman, that’s where it stops.’”
It makes you wonder whether those politicians, whom Chadha won’t mention by name, had ever actually seen any of her eight feature films, which have been gently – and sometimes riotously – dismantling stereotypes since 1993. “My stories say we all have varied cultural leanings and are empowered by different things,” she says.
Born in Kenya to Indian Sikh parents, Chadha was two when civil unrest led the family to move to Britain in the 1960s. “I never lived in India, so Southall is my home town,” she says of the west London enclave, where she witnessed the myriad perspectives fracturing the so-called Asian community. That would feed into her films: her debut, Bhaji on the Beach – about a women’s outing to Blackpool – sees the day-trippers clash over what counts as “respectable behaviour”. In Viceroy’s House, Hindus, Muslims and Sikh workers split along political as much as religious lines. In Blinded By the Light, as in her best-known film Bend It Like Beckham, the central conflict is not East v West but fathers and their children.
The long entanglement between Britain and India shapes the way Chadha thinks about identity today. “My storytelling doesn’t start in modern day London; it began hundreds of years ago with Queen Elizabeth I granting the East India Company a monopoly to go to India, where British immigrants began the economic plunder that fuelled industrial Britain – telling the truth of that part of Britishness shaped by the diaspora.”
Consequently, having Asian leads in adaptations of It’s a Wonderful Life (It’s a Wonderful Afterlife), Pride and Prejudice (Bride and Prejudice) and now Dickens feels entirely natural: “To see a character you don’t expect in that setting is to open up the world – and that story – in new ways.”
On an overcast summer’s day, I visit the Christmas Karma set, on location in a picturesque street in Camden Town, north London, witnessing the pivotal moment when her Scrooge – or Sood – glimpses the Cratchits’ Christmas table and overhears what the ailing Tiny Tim really thinks of him. What the Dickens prose never accounted for was this: a gay African American Ghost of Christmas Present in a sparkly emerald three-piece suit; Bob Cratchit (Leo Suter) leading his wife Mary (Pixie Lott) in a guitar-led ballad; and a director crouched on a narrow staircase, eyes darting between the monitor and the mayhem. “That scene was tough for Kunal,” she says when we speak later. “You can’t have Sood soften too soon – one misplaced smile at the end of a line can ruin the journey.”
Capturing the right mood drives the film-maker, especially in today’s divided Britain. She notes that Dickens is widely believed today to have had bipolar disorder and would have been “destroyed by the disparity between the wealthy and poor”, she explains. “He’s trying to figure out why people can be mean and selfish.” While editing the film she was struck by a line where the Ghost of Christmas Present asks: “Is one CEO worth a thousand Tim Cratchits?” Even though it wasn’t intended as a direct allusion, “I thought, people will assume I mean Elon Musk and the rise of the [tech] CEOs,” she says.
Gathering a cast of this magnitude would be like Christmas for most British film-makers, but such is Chadha’s global stature that actors dream up ways of catching her eye. Eva Longoria invited her to host a screening of Flamin’ Hot, her own directorial debut. Over dinner, the Desperate Housewives star told Chadha she’d love to work with her, and Chadha told her about Christmas Karma. Longoria was adamant that she should be a ghost. “She said: ‘I’m Mexican – we own ghosts. Day of the Dead. Hello?’” Chadha says it was a lightbulb moment; she went home and rewrote the part, finding a British mariachi band to back her up.
The emphasis in Chadha’s films – and in the way she carries herself off camera – is always on fun, which is perhaps why the British film industry underrates her. In the past 30 years, only Steve McQueen, as a British director of colour, has been as consistent or as successful. Bend It Like Beckham was released in every country in the world. “Even North Korea,” she chimes. Yet, like Nancy Meyers in the US – another film-maker who makes popular, female-centric movies – she often finds herself underappreciated and condescended to.
“Whatever they see me as, I don’t see myself as that,” Chadha says of British film executives. “The amount of money I’ve made for the British film industry is enormous. People want me to make bleeding-heart films about suffering Asian women and racism. I could make searingly political films, but who’s going to watch them? People who read Sight and Sound? Another reason my films aren’t taken seriously is that people don’t value women. I show the world from a female perspective – and women come up to me in tears, saying my films meant so much to them growing up.”
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For all the talk of equality, she believes the British film industry still has a race problem. “If you put a person of colour in the lead in a British movie, 90% of the industry backs away,” she says. “What the industry isn’t comfortable with is me making a film like Christmas Karma – with a genuinely diverse cast and catchy songs – when, on paper, they think it shouldn’t work.”
Her influence extends beyond her films. “I had a big hand in getting the tax credit [for films] increased,” she says. “At a film day in Downing Street, Rishi Sunak said he wasn’t going to do it – so I got up and gave this impassioned speech. By the end, he said: ‘You know what, I want to help Gurinder and people like Gurinder.’ And he did. Afterwards, people looked at me differently. Producer Andy Paterson still says: ‘Oh my God, that speech.’” When we speak, she’s on her way to India as part of a trade mission aimed at strengthening Britain’s ties with the country.
Is the world Chadha depicts in her movies under threat from the rise of Reform UK, with its mantra that immigration is out of control, British culture has been eroded, and the country has become hostage to wokeness? She dismisses the notion. “Reform are a minority; we have to remember that,” she says. “While I understand the idea of trying to protect your cultural identity, there’s no room for hatred or racism from anyone, on any side, of any colour.”
Rather, she sees the climate as an opportunity for her diaspora-centred movies. “There are enough people unhappy with what’s happening politically who will find the film a soothing balm,” she says. “One reason Bend It Like Beckham was so popular was that it came out after 9/11. The world was traumatised and unsure where to turn – then came this sweet, innocent film celebrating different cultures.” She sent the internet into raptures recently with the announcement that she’s working on a sequel to that most beloved of football films. “With the rise of women’s football, I’ve been persuaded to revisit the story and imagine what they’d all be doing today,” she teases.
Her creative team already has a star consultant in the shape of the United States and former Chelsea Women’s manager Emma Hayes. “We went for a curry the other day – she’s from Camden, where I live,” Chadha recalls. “It started with her fangirling me when we first met, saying she was Keira Knightley and cried her eyes out when the film ended. Now I’m talking to her about the business side of football, about the struggles and successes she’s had. I’m doing my due diligence.
“It’s so loved I don’t want to do any old shit,” she adds. “Unless I have something to say, I won’t say it.”
Christmas Karma is in UK cinemas from 14 November.
