DE PALMA'S FILM A HUGE IMPACT ON IT'S A WONDERFUL AFTERLIFE DIRECTOR
It's A Wonderful Afterlife is said to be a film that puts several genres into a blender with uproarious results. Director Gurinder Chadha talked to The Northern Echo's Steve Pratt about how she came up with the idea to bring the house down at a London-set Indian wedding by bringing in a bit of Brian De Palma's Carrie. Carrie had a "huge impact" on Chadha, according to Pratt, as the first horror film she'd ever seen. Here's how she tells it to Pratt:
The way this movie came together was I was watching a clip on TV, on one of these 100 great family film kind of shows, of Bend It Like Beckham [a hit film Chadha directed in 2002]. They’d selected the wedding scene.
I was watching at home and thinking ‘ah, I loved shooting that scene’. It was so much fun, it’s got all my relatives and friends in it. I thought I’ll never be able to make another film with a wedding scene unless I subvert it. That’s when I had the idea that it would be great to do an Indian wedding scene but turn it into the prom scene from Carrie.
I come up with ideas for films that no one else has made that I’d really love to see, particularly featuring the West London Asian community.
Ghosts on their own are not particularly funny, but Indian women as ghosts are funny to me. The same with the Carrie scene. Doing a Carrie scene on its own is just not funny but Indian women having samosas and curry thrown at them, that is funny.
Taking those moments and putting a cultural spin on them is funny for me. And for the Indian audience it’s like a breath of fresh air to see ourselves in this kind of movie because no one makes movies with Indian ghosts.
Chadha tells Deadline Hollywood's Tim Adler that she next plans to channel the spirit of David Lean for a historical epic about the Indian Partition.