LIKE A BOSS
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT I Gurinder Chadha on a movie that’s anything but your typical music biopic.
The last thing I wanted to do was a jukebox musical,” writer/director Gurinder Chadha tells Teasers. “I really didn’t want to do that.” Her latest movie, Blinded By The Light, could be called ‘a Bruce Springsteen movie’, but don’t go expecting a Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic of the Boss, or a Rocketman-esque musical.
Rather than telling Springsteen’s story, it focuses on a British teenager of Pakistani descent, Javed (Viveik Kalra). It’s heavily inspired by the memoir of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, who found an escape through the Boss’ music while growing up in the ’80s. “I think Sarfraz and I are probably the two biggest Asian fans of Bruce in the UK,” laughs Chadha, who was turned on to Springsteen’s music when she worked in the record department of Harrods, and a friend suggested she listen to Born To Run. “And that’s what got me, because the cover was a white guy and a black guy looking like they really loved each other.”
An obsession was born. “Sarfraz and I connected because we were big Bruce fans,” continues Chadha. “When I read [his book], I said, ‘I know how to turn this into a film. It will be inspired by your book, but I have to turn it into a drama.’” That meant dramatising Manzoor’s experiences and weaving in Springsteen’s lyrics to create a feelgood confection. “The central idea of a character study of a boy who uses Springsteen’s words to find a way through quite a depressing time in Thatcher’s Britain – that is totally Sarfraz’s story. When it came to me, I just took the songs and the lyrics of Bruce, and really made them my own.”
Of course, it wouldn’t work with permission to use the big man’s music, so Chadha and Manzoor used an encounter at a film premiere to pounce on Springsteen. With Bruce on board, Chadha knocked the script into shape. “I sent it to Bruce, and Bruce came back and said, ‘Yeah, I’m all good with this.’ And that was literally our green light.”
As well as featuring Springsteen’s unique, uplifting blue-collar rock, the film doesn’t shy away from the racist abuse British Indians faced in that era. “I think it’s a salient reminder that we don’t want to go back there,” says Chadha. “I think that the world has changed, and I think that Britain has changed for the good. But I think that there will always be scurrilous politicians who will use the race card to get votes.”
So, if Blinded By The Light isn’t actually a musical, how would Chadha describe it? “I’d say that it’s a film with music,” she says. “A film with a lot of music, about the power of music to connect people across any kind of divide – culture, class, race, whatever.”
ETA | 9 AUGUST / BLINDED BY THE LIGHT OPENS THIS SUMMER.