FILM

It’s taken over a decade, but the sequel to indie smash ‘East is East’ is finally here. Robin Askew reports on the many challenges which faced the makers of Pakistani-bound, inevitably titled ‘West is West’.

Back in 1999, 'East Is East' appeared out of the blue to become one of the biggest British independent hits of all time. Better yet for the producer and distributor, there was obvious scope for a sequel. But it's taken more than a decade to reach the screen. Writer Ayub Khan Din was so eager not to turn out a cynical cash-in that it took years for producer Leslee Udwin to persuade him to write the follow-up to his autobiographical tale, which holds up a mirror to the first film by sending the Khan family on a journey from Salford to rural Pakistan back in the mid-70s. In addition, original director Damien O'Donnell parted company with the producer and writer, so TV veteran Andy DeEmmony was drafted in to make his debut as a feature director. Nobody's elaborating on the reasons for this except to say that there had been a "fundamental difference of opinion" on where the story should go.

"I love this sort of material," DeEmmony enthuses. "I think what Ayub writes is great: combining laughter and tears very tightly. I suppose I was daunted about doing a sequel because I loved the first film so much. It broke new ground. But when I read the script, I fell in love with it and just had to do it."

In the funny, truthful and refreshingly non-PC first film, you'll recall, Pakistani chip shop owner George Khan, played by Bollywood legend Om Puri, was struggling to keep his mosque-dodging brood on the straight and narrow, specifically by separating young Sajid from his foreskin and marrying off the two oldest lads to the ugliest girls in Bradford. Attempting to keep the peace between George and his westernised offspring was his 100% pure Lancashire wife Ella (Linda Bassett). As the sequel opens, George's family has diminished. Only 15-year-old Sajid remains in school, but he's been bunking off to avoid racist bullies. So George resolves to make a belated return to his rural Punjab homeland in the hope that the Wife Number One he abandoned 30 years earlier can make a good Muslim of the runt of his litter. Needless to say, complications arise.

Although most of the team behind 'East Is East' returned for the sequel, the main challenge was in finding an actor to play Sajid. An extensive trawl through schools in the north of England led to 300 boys being auditioned. Sixteen-year-old Aqib Khan from Leeds was one of the last they saw. "We just stopped once we'd found him," says DeEmmony. "Not having acted at all, he was a real find. The character's a cheeky little sod and so's he. So it works really well. We saw a lot of Asian boys where just the process of swearing is tricky. Whereas it comes pretty easily to Aqib."

"I knew it was going to be huge," grins Aqib, who appears to revel in his cheeky-little-soddishness. "Everyone I know knows 'East Is East'. But I tried not to think about it, because that could screw up my performance. Everything was new to me, but it was surprisingly easy."

So does he feel a kinship with Sajid? "As a British Asian boy you would do, absorbing different cultures while living in Britain. It's a bit difficult for some. I found it quite easy, but there are drawbacks and I kind of put them in my performance. With Sajid, you can put yourself in his position. I've seen people around me who had problems like he has, trying to fit into two cultures at once. When he's at school he's bullied because he's half Pakistani, whereas when he went back to Pakistan he was discriminated against because he was half English. So he kind of learnt that, 'I'm not going to be accepted in either culture, so forget it.'"

Shooting the first film in glamorous Salford was relatively straightforward. The Pakistan-set sequel proved rather more tricky, as DeEmmony explains. "We did try [to shoot in Pakistan], but unfortunately we just couldn't get an insurance bond. At one stage we came close to doing Hostile Territory Training at the BBC to be allowed to go there. But it was too tricky. It's set in the Punjab and we were still filming in the Punjab, which was split during partition, so visually it's very similar. And in India the Punjab is still quite mixed - Muslims and Hindus - so I think it has an authentic ring."

This was an entirely new experience for the director, whose TV background ranges from 'Father Ted' and 'Red Dwarf' to such well-received feature-length BBC dramas as 'Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story' and 'Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!' "Shooting in blue skies for five weeks was lovely. I'm so used to fighting the weather in this country. So that was a beautiful option."

And the downsides? "Cow shit's probably the biggest difficulty we had. It seemed to be everywhere. We had a scene in a pond where there was cow shit floating up wherever you trod. It was pretty gross. Where we were wasn't on the tourist trail or the film-making trail. We built our own farm. We wanted a bit of flat land, and we needed a bit of landscape, so we went to where the farmland hit the Himalayas. And because we were low budget, we didn't go to the big film centres in India. So we were out in the middle of nowhere with a lot of first-time crew. They were quite harsh conditions in terms of the luxury we'd normally associate with film-making."

Given the trouble 'The King's Speech' experienced with the censor's rather too literal interpretation of its swearing rules, which consists of simply totting up the expletives without any regard for their context, one can't help but wonder whether there was any pressure to tone down what was, let's be honest here, one of the highlights of the first film. "We had a lot of debate on it, to be honest," sighs DeEmmony. "But it felt like you would be castrating the voice of the film somehow. I grew up in that Salford world and I think if we'd have sensitised it, it wouldn't have had the same feel. It might bite us at some stage, but it felt like the right way go. It's hard to say whether the swearing is gratuitous or not. At times it's funny, at times it's painful. But I think it has a truth to it."

As we spoke, the BBFC had yet to give the film a certificate, but DeEmmony was naturally keen to reach as wide an audience as possible. "I'd love it to be a 12A. It's weird - I used to do 'Father Ted' and we'd get away with 'feck' all the time. But I don't think you can do it with this." Guess what? 'West Is West' was eventually given a 15 certificate.

Without giving too much away, there's obvious potential for a third film. Indeed, right from the outset Ayub Khan Din's experiences seemed to form a natural trilogy. Everyone involved is eager to re-unite. Just one problem, as the director readily acknowledges. "Yeah, the pressure's already applying on Ayub to do the third. At 15, he was taken to Pakistan and there is a next stage to that. Whether it's going to take another ten years, or if can get it from him sooner, I just don't know…"

'WEST IS WEST' OPENED ON FRI 25 FEB. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2011 

Tweet