And with this film, is do something which feels like it’s specific to my culture and my country. “Bruce spoke to me in Luton with his work, which seems defined in specificity, but actually was universal,” he says.
#BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN BLINDED BY THE LIGHT MOVIE#
Manzoor hopes the movie’s specific and authentic cultural details only make the movie more universal.
She was basically saying to Bruce, ‘That Gurinder, she’s so talented…'” She was a massive fan of Bend It Like Beckham. “ Now that I’ve spoken to Patti,” says Chadha, who met her at the film’s Asbury Park premiere, “she’s such a supporter of women. And he looked at me and went, ‘I think Clarence would really like that.'”Ĭhadha recently learned that Patti Scialfa likely helped the movie get made. And I want to just cut a little bit to the relevant parts, but I can’t do that without your permission. I was talking to him, and I said to him I want to use ‘Jungleland’ for this sequence of a fascist March I want to use the sax of Clarence Clemons. “But there was a massive dilemma there – it’s set in a march about hate, and I love ‘Jungleland.’ And then when we came to see Bruce on Broadway, we met him after. “As I was shooting that scene, all I was hearing was that sax in my head,” says Chadha. Springsteen personally approved a disquieting scene where a brutal racist attack is set to the saxophone coda of “Jungleland.” “I needed an element where the British-Asian story was also being told,” says Gurinder, “and not just through Bruce.” This is not me.” One idea he nixed outright was a scene where the character gets drunk, since Manzoor doesn’t drink: “That would’ve been too weird for me.” One of the best additions was a scene set in a daytimer, an afternoon nightclub aimed at British kids of South Asian backgrounds that includes the film’s greatest non-Springsteen song, the bhangra banger “Maar Chadapa” by the group Heera. There were times when I was watching the film and I thought I’m just watching a film. But I was never as invested in as I was the family stuff and in the Bruce stuff. I totally get it because it adds another dimension to the film. And for me, the film was, at the core, a buddy movie and a father/son movie. Manzoor was initially dubious of the film’s romantic subplot, “because I didn’t have a girlfriend then. But at its core it’ll always be a 16-year-old kid who turns to Bruce Springsteen to help him in dark times.” “I have to start adding moments that didn’t necessarily happen in your life. “I needed to tell him, this character is inspired by you, but he can’t be you,” Gurinder explains. His movie counterpart, renamed Javed, has a ramped-up conflict with his strict father, for instance - in real life, Manzoor would never have talked back to his dad as a teenager. Manzoor, understandably, had to get used to some of the movie’s fictionalized elements. You’re suddenly reminded it’s possible for a Muslim kid in England to adore the idea of America and completely worship the best American icon there is.” Manzoor adds: “I think one of the reasons it’s doing well with audiences, is that it offers some joy and hope in a joyless and hopeless time. And that’s the point, really, of the film.” And that’s what I think the majority of people want to raise their kids to know. “In that sense, we all stand side by side, and it’s not an us or them - we’re all in it together. And as he says, ‘No one wins unless everybody wins.’ Through the amazing words and philosophies of Bruce Springsteen, we want to show a different path, a different version of society. “I don’t think any of us would have known why how relevant it was going to be when the movie actually came out,” she says, “in all kinds of countries all over the world.
How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin BiopicĬhadha describes the movie as a sort of social-realist musical, with a timely universalist message in the age of Brexit and Trump. Chadha and Manzoor (who wrote the screenplay with Chadha and Paul Berges) shared some insight into the film’s creation. Springsteen himself was a fan of Manzoor’s book, which paved the way for a movie filled with, and defined by, his music.
In reality, while the trend certainly didn’t hurt its buzz at Sundance earlier this year, Blinded by the Light is a low-budget British independent film, a long-in-the-works passion project based on the story of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor (first told in his memoir Greetings From Bury Park), and directed by Gurinder Chadha ( Bend It Like Beckham), a longtime Springsteen fan in her own right. town of Luton who finds liberation in the music of Bruce Springsteen - is part of the current Hollywood wave of classic-rock-sploitation ( Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Yesterday, and soon, no doubt, Styx and Kansas biopics). It would be easy to assume that the new movie Blinded by the Light - which squeezes maximum uplift out of the tale of a 1980s British-Pakistani teen in the gritty U.K.
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