Hanif Kureishi Regis Dialogue with A.O Scott, 2001

A.O. Scott: I'm A.O. Scott, a film critic at . I'm here at the Walker Art Center for a Regis dialogue with Hanif Kureishi, the British playwright, novelist, screenwriter and film director.

Hanif Kureishi: Hello.

A.O. Scott: Thank you. Thank you.

Hanif Kureishi: Hi.

A.O. Scott: A number of people, a very big crowd actually, last night, came out to see what was the official North American premier of Intimacy, a new film based on some of your stories and your novel of that title, directed by Patrice Chéreau. We're going to see a clip from that in a minute, but I wondered if we could start off by talking about that, and what that project was like, and how that collaboration developed with a French director with a background in opera and theater coming to make this film set in a very gritty and specific .

Hanif Kureishi: I think as I've got older I've got more interested in collaboration. Mostly I'm on my own, I spend a day on my own. I get fed up with that now. I guess I want to be changed by the people. For the best.

A.O. Scott: Yeah, of course.

Hanif Kureishi: Where possible. When Patrice Chéreau came to see me and said he wanted to make a film of Intimacy I was very pleased. Particularly as Intimacy is a monologue set in one room, it didn't seem to me to necessarily be right for a movie. But I liked him, I liked his face and I thought, okay, let's see where this will go.

Hanif Kureishi: He was passionate about this book. Also he was passionate about a story I wrote called Nightlight, which was actually based on a friend of mine, about a couple who meet once a week to copulate without speaking. Patrice wanted to use this as the basis of the film.

Hanif Kureishi: So we had these copulations.

A.O. Scott: One of which you'll see in a moment, by the way.

Sep 29, 2001 1

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. There were five copulations, or four, but there were going to be a number of copulations throughout the film. The film was going to be based around these copulations. So that it became fuck one, fuck two, fuck three. Like movements in a symphony.

Hanif Kureishi: Of course around the copulation, it's like a French film ... actually in French films people copulate all the time, then they...

A.O. Scott: Right. Then they think of what else to do with themselves in between.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. Well then they go on the subway.

A.O. Scott: Yeah, right.

Hanif Kureishi: And then they copulate again. This was going to be one of those. We had to have a story in between the copulations, and so we sat around in a hotel and we ... actually our meetings were rather like the copulations, because ... I began to realize this, because Patrice Chéreau and I didn't know each other. We were complete strangers and we would meet in a hotel room once a week to try to do this huge thing, which was make a film together.

A.O. Scott: And without a language in common I take it.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah, without a language in common, and just trying to talk and get to know each other and figure out what we might do.

Hanif Kureishi: We kind of figured out a story. At the end of the road where I live there was a theater, it was a bar, and downstairs was a theater. We went into the bar for a drink one day and there's a big sign in the bar and it says, "Theater and toilets," with an arrow pointing downstairs. Patrice, who has obviously spent his whole life in the theater was really affected by this sign saying, "Theater and toilets."

Hanif Kureishi: He said, "I want to see the theater." So we went downstairs, we saw the theater, and they were doing ... It was a tiny little room and they were doing weird productions of things like Dorian Gray and Streetcar Named Desire, and so on, and the big pillars and stuff. This theater got into the movie. You'll see it in the movie. He had to rebuild this theater, and in fact that bar, in a studio nearby because it was so small he couldn't film down there.

Hanif Kureishi: So all these kind of funny elements, stuff that we saw, and also the idea of making a film about London, of Sep 29, 2001 2 people moving through the city following each other, the buses, the streets, and so on, because I liked the idea of a foreign director making a film about a city.

Hanif Kureishi: So somehow out of all these bits and pieces and the copulations we got to make a movie, which is really how all movies, or all anything comes together somehow. Usually though in one person's mind, but in this case in my mind and Patrice's mind, and also in the mind of the screenwriter who wrote the film, who was French, and wrote the movie in French. So the movie was written in French, was translated, then it was sent back to me.

A.O. Scott: Were you around during the filming? Did you have contact with the actors who were-

Hanif Kureishi: I was around during the rehearsals and I hung around with the actors a bit, and talked to the actors a bit. There are some directors who want you on the set, and who like you being around like who always likes you being around, because he'll say, "Would they really do that? Would they really say that? Is that right?" Someone like Chéreau clearly didn't want me there at all. There's another director like who did The Buddha of Suburbia who kind of wants you to be there, but hates you being there because he thinks all you're doing is thinking bad things about what he's doing.

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: Different directors have different attitudes depending on how paranoid they are basically.

A.O. Scott: Yep. The acting, and the direction I must say, of this film, and those of you who have seen it I think would agree, is really extraordinary. Very powerful, very raw. I think without further ado we'll go to the first copulation that begins the movie. We have Jay and Claire meeting anonymously in the middle of the week in London.

A.O. Scott: Having just concluded the copulation that is being rewound at this moment, but it is ... you were talking about London and how this movie sort of propels people through the city, and this is the second scene of the movie and you have him out in traffic, on the radio, and that's in its way as powerful a moment in this man's life as what we've just seen before.

Hanif Kureishi: What, shaving?

A.O. Scott: Shaving and ... there's a sort of intensity to that traffic-

Hanif Kureishi: The shave, yeah.

Sep 29, 2001 3

A.O. Scott: ... and the shave. Yeah. We've all had difficult shaves like that.

Hanif Kureishi: Are you going to rewind this and show the copulation or-

A.O. Scott: Or leave it to these good people's imagination.

Hanif Kureishi: Where's this?

Speaker 3: We're working on rewinding the film back.

A.O. Scott: Okay.

Hanif Kureishi: All right.

Speaker 3: We'll have it momentarily.

Hanif Kureishi: Okay.

A.O. Scott: All right. Maybe just to sort of work people up to an even greater pitch of anticipation we could ... In many of the movies that you've worked on that have been based on your work, sex has a central part. There are a lot of ... There's a scene in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, I think you referred to it once as the fuck sandwich, for you have the three copulating couples on top of each other on split screens.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah.

A.O. Scott: Raise your eyebrow. But, what's-

Hanif Kureishi: What is it with this copulation? Yeah.

A.O. Scott: Yes. Thank you. That was the question.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess I'm interested in, you could say ... moments like that are dramatic. There's the sensuality, there's the Sep 29, 2001 4 ethical, there's the political. Often the couples in my work are mixed race as well, as my parents were. It seems to me just a way of bringing together a number of elements. For instance, in My Son the Fanatic the father, whose son becomes a Muslim fundamentalist, is at the same time having an affair with a prostitute played by Rachel Griffiths. That occurred to me because when I was researching the film, My Son the Fanatic, for instance, in the north of I noticed that the prostitutes and the Muslims lived very close together because they were all poor. They were finding it very difficult to live together.

Hanif Kureishi: So the idea of a man being drawn between the two of them, and of course most of the taxi drivers in Bradford and Halifax drive the prostitutes around. And the Asian women, the Muslim women are mostly at home.

A.O. Scott: At home, yeah.

Hanif Kureishi: Mostly their relationships were with the prostitutes. To me, I could see this is a very interesting political conjunction as well as everything else. So you find a moment where the political, the social, sexual, and all that stuff as it were, comes together at once. For a writer that is a good way of showing certain kinds of complexities I think.

A.O. Scott: Are we ready with it?

Speaker 4: Almost.

A.O. Scott: Almost.

Speaker 3: ...if you'd like to show it now.

A.O. Scott: Okay. Let's go to that long anticipated copulation in the first scene of Intimacy.

A.O. Scott: Who is that applauding? So then he shaves and goes to work. The other thing actually about this scene that's striking, and that I think resonates with other films that you've done is the music. In the scene that we accidentally saw he shoves the cassette in the car tape deck and he's listening to David Bowie, and here you have The Clash and London Calling.

A.O. Scott: Pop music in a way, as much as sexuality, seems to have a really central place in your work, and in your character's lives.

Hanif Kureishi: Pop music was the only culture we had, and it was the general culture that we had. We would exchange Sep 29, 2001 5 records at school. And no, we wouldn't be able to talk about Chekhov. So that was our language. It also introduced me to the politics of the time. Actually I remember it was ... I believe it's probably the first film Easy Rider, is the first film that actually uses what they called then found music. I.E., they played records over the images.

Hanif Kureishi: And I remember seeing Easy Rider in the back of the Moden, and being very impressed it had Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack, and I kind of thought, well you can bring all these things together.

Hanif Kureishi: I remember when I was writing The Buddha of Suburbia, being very anxious about whether you could put pop music in books. Because I'd never read a book before that had pop music in it really. Could you write semi-literary books about boys who like pop music?

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: Now you can't write a book without pop music in it. In those days I was nervous about that. Of course, that was the world in which I lived.

Hanif Kureishi: I wanted to find a way of bringing them together. Obviously in the movies too. But Patrice put the music on this film, and he loves all that kind of music. It was his choice, the music.

A.O. Scott: Yeah. It's interesting about the character too. He just has all those CDs in those boxes down there. And here's a man who's fled from his family, left everything behind, but somehow is holding onto what he takes with him.

Hanif Kureishi: When you leave your wife, or when you leave your husband what records do you take with you? There are those moments. There's a moment like in Sammy and Rosie when the couple are separating their books, and that's yours, that's his. Which ones you claim, which ones you want to take. These seem to me to be particularly poignant moments about separation.

A.O. Scott: Yeah. Let's backtrack a little bit and talk about what led you up to this point and beyond. I should mention you also have a new novel that's just been published by Scribner's called Gabriel's Gift. How did you start out to become a writer? Did you think ... You've worked in theater as a playwright and as a screenwriter and as a novelist, and I think are one of the few contemporary writers who seems equally at ease in all of these forms. So how did it come about? What brought you to it?

Hanif Kureishi: I could go back to that, but I was thinking about that the other day and I was thinking actually one of the writers that was most prominent in my life when I was younger actually was Graham Greene. Greene obviously wrote movies, short stories, novels, essays, and so on. Sep 29, 2001 6

A.O. Scott: Film criticism too, yeah.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. It's not necessarily so unusual that ... I guess I started writing because when I grew up in the '60s in South London I was the only Asian kid in my street, in the neighborhood. We didn't have multiculturalism. We didn't even have a word, like racism, and all of that. It was rough, and it was tough, and there was a politician in Britain, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's called Enoch Powell, who was a racist and made racist speeches.

Hanif Kureishi: I was looking at that and I was thinking ... I've always been interested in flesh, in human flesh and skin. I guess it's particularly because when I walked down the street people would say, "Paki," or they would spit because of the color of my skin. Also with my father who was much darker, obviously, than me.

Hanif Kureishi: So I got interested in flesh. You'd walk down the street and people would look at you, and they would do bad stuff to their heads. You internalize this. You begin to feel really bad inside about yourself, as they say. You begin to wonder what it is about you that's bringing on this badness in other people. You feel very separate from other people. There was writing in my family.

Hanif Kureishi: So I started to write, I guess, in order to speak. To speak to other people I didn't know about the fact that kids, other kids would abuse me or spit on me, and basically thought that I shouldn't exist, Pakistani people shouldn't be around in South London.

Hanif Kureishi: So writing for me was a way of kind of huddling up with myself in order to speak in the hope that after a bit there would be somebody else who would see this, would know that this went on, and would kind of understand it. Because where I lived there was no ... I couldn't talk about this to anybody, because most of my friends were ... they came from racists families. I couldn't go to ... There were lots of girls I couldn't go to their houses because their fathers wouldn't have me in the house. After a while I kind of figured this out because other people would go to these houses.

Hanif Kureishi: You start to feel weird. And then to make sense of that I started to write, to write stories about this. Rather like The Buddha of Suburbia, set at school about young men not unlike myself in this situation. And I read people like Richard Wright, James Baldwin. There weren't really any British writers who were dealing with this stuff.

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: I was just kind of finding a way of speaking about this, trying to get it outside of myself, as it were.

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A.O. Scott: Did you start out, was it fiction first or was it fiction and ? How did you gravitate toward the theater?

Hanif Kureishi: First of all I wrote novels. I wrote three or four novels between I guess the age of 14 and 18, and I was really serious about it because I knew ... my destiny was to work in a bank or to work in Customs and Excise or to be in insurance. That was what the low middle class in the suburbs were expected to do. We were clerks.

Hanif Kureishi: I kind of figured I had to get out of it. I didn't want to be like that because of pop. I thought I'd be a writer, and I took it very seriously. It was my father's wish, he wanted to be a writer. So I was living his wish.

Hanif Kureishi: Then I wrote a play and sent it to the Royal Court. I got a job at the Royal Court the next day. My father said, rather cynically, "It's only because they fancy you." But I got a job. I was selling ice creams. I was working in the theater, and I was working with Samuel Beckett a few days later. He was rehearsing a play called Footfalls with Billie Whitelaw. I was working in the theater. It was great.

Hanif Kureishi: At that time in the early '70s in London there was a lot of cheap property, so there were a lot of theaters. A lot of them run by Americans, like The Open Space run by Charles Marowitz, Almost Free, lots of theaters in pubs and bars, and upstairs and downstairs, and lunchtime theaters.

Hanif Kureishi: So I started to get involved in that, because the theater at that time was concerned with things like sexuality, with class, race, the emerging gay movement, the, I think, the Gay Sweatshop, which was just starting. So this was more funky to me than sitting at home writing novels. There were other people. There was music, and it was performance and all that stuff. So I decided to work in the theater.

A.O. Scott: Then how did you gravitate from there to film? was the first film that you wrote-

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah, that was much later.

A.O. Scott: ... collaboration.

Hanif Kureishi: I worked in the theater I guess from '76 in various capacities until, My Beautiful Laundrette was about '84, so I had a good run in the theater for quite a while as a young man. Well then Channel 4 started. They didn't have any movies. Channel 4's brief was to make movies for television and for theaters. And so they started to work with directors like , Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Peter Greenaway, were making movies, most of them 16 mil, and releasing them in the cinema.

Hanif Kureishi: They're good liberal company, and they needed an Asian. I was the Asian. In those days I got all the Asian Sep 29, 2001 8 work that was around, because I'd written plays with Asians in them. They asked me to write a movie. At that time I had an uncle who had a launderette, and he used to take me around his launderette, and he wanted me to take over. He was kind of looking after me. He could see that I had no money, I was trying to be a writer, it was crap. He said, "Look, why don't you just write and run launderettes? It's good."

Hanif Kureishi: He'd drive me around to these launderettes, like the uncle in the movie saying, "Look at this, man. Do this." He was a real Thatcherite, and he was an Asian. This seemed odd to me, because Thatcher didn't like Asians.

A.O. Scott: But there's the great line in My Beautiful Laundrette where he says, "To Thatcher and your beautiful launderette. Do they go together?" He says, "Like dal and chapati."

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. Yeah. He had it figured out. I also had an uncle who was a socialist who was an uncle as well. I also had many friends who I'd grown up with who were skinheads, who were racists who used to come to my house. I knew, I'd been to school with them, like the character of Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette. So I had all this stuff, I had all this material. It was just finding a way or organizing it and writing this movie. It was all there ready to go.

A.O. Scott: From that fairly, fairly quickly followed Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, also with Stephen Frears. And I think we can go to a clip from that now that goes to some of what you're talking about, the atmosphere. This is now the mid '80s sort of Thatcherite London, but also I think captures some of the artistic scene and the emerging multiculturalism that you've been speaking of. Let's watch a moment from Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

Hanif Kureishi: It's Colin MacCabe. Do you know who Colin MacCabe is?

A.O. Scott: And I was meaning to ask you what the relationship is between a bag of crisps and the self-enclosed unity of the linguistic side. That last bit, neither of us are English, but we're Londoners, I think is very central to the idea of the city and the hope for the city that animates a lot of your work. You have here the son, the father saying, "Come home," meaning come home to where you belong. And Sammy is rejecting that idea of an identity back in the homeland.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess at this time this was right in the middle of Thatcherism, and Thatcherism was really arguing for Englishness and patriotism and English history and all that. Us Asians, and the black people, and other people were trying to work out where they fit into this scheme. We were trying to see where we might belong in this. I guess it's partly about thinking, how do we claim that we are British without aligning ourselves with Thatcher or with people that we don't like?

Hanif Kureishi: So we'd try out different things by saying, "We're British," or, "We're Europeans," or, "We're Londoners," and so on and so on. Then after a while we figured out that the idea of Englishness had to change, had to be

Sep 29, 2001 9 different to include all of us. This is really about how you figure out how you belong in a country where in fact you aren't really wanted, and which has had a colonial relationship with you for 200 years at least.

Hanif Kureishi: So I guess this comes out of that period.

A.O. Scott: What was your sense ... Your father is from Pakistan, or from India.

Hanif Kureishi: Well, from India really.

A.O. Scott: From India

Hanif Kureishi: And then my family moved to Pakistan later on.

A.O. Scott: Right. Right. What was your sense of your relationship to that background? Here and at other points in your films characters express or feel a kind of pull of the homeland. Sometimes they succumb to it, sometimes they pull back in the other direction. How did that sort of identity inform you?

Hanif Kureishi: I went to Pakistan, to Karachi for the first time in the early '80s. Of course I had known my Pakistani family had spent, as rich Asians do, most of the summer in England. I knew them all anyone. Then I went to Pakistan for the first time. And it was the beginning of the Islamization. It was the first time really that the ... Pakistan was founded on Islam, but it hadn't been a theocratic state really until this period, the early '80s. It had been kind of military dictatorship, semi-democratic, but it hadn't been theocratic, it hadn't been run by the mullahs. People didn't consult the Quran about the economic situation until this period.

Hanif Kureishi: I went to Pakistan for the first time then. I was flabbergasted and devastated by this, the fact that this country ... It was called by intellectuals in the country the Great Leap Backwards. The country was beginning to be run on Islamic principles, and General Zia, he would go to sleep, he would have a dream, and when he had a dream then it would be implemented the next day as a kind of law. My family, who were kind of middle class, intellectuals, and liberals, and so on were really shocked by suddenly the fact that this country was descending into a theocratic state.

Hanif Kureishi: This was very interesting and very shocking for me, and it made me realize what an Englishman I was. Because all the stuff that I liked, going to bars, girls, reading books, the media, all those things, you couldn't do any of those things in Karachi. You could do them in the house.

A.O. Scott: Right. There's the line in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid about, "I know your family in Karachi, every weekend they come over to our house for booze and bridge and VCR." Sep 29, 2001 10

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. I mean the chief of police used to come to my family's house in Karachi to drink whiskey. I always used to say to him, "You've got to arrest yourself really." And all the whiskey would be ... the bottles would all be in the bath to soak the labels off. So I could see that liberals were living under some kind of siege, and I became aware that the country was going in a direction that was very unpleasant to me. I guess Sammy and Rosie is partly about that.

Hanif Kureishi: Then later on My Son the Fanatic became partly about what happens to countries.

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: It's not a good idea, I realized, to found a country on theocratic principles.

A.O. Scott: Yeah. We're about to see a clip from My Son the Fanatic, which does in a way flip this on its head. We have the main character in this one is a Pakistani taxi driver in the north of England, played by , an extraordinary performance, who is quite ... he has a hard life and he works hard, but he's in a way contented with being in England. He has a son who's engaged to a proper English girl, and who begins to drift toward the Islamic fundamentalist and away from his father. The scene we're about to see is a confrontation between them that I think gets very much at the issues we've been talking about.

A.O. Scott: One of the things I love about that scene that sort of plays up the irony of it is the accents of the two actors. You have the father which this fairly heavy subcontinental English accent, and his son with this northern English accent that is unmistakable for anything else saying, "I can't raise my children in this country. Our cultures can't mix." When he's obviously the living refutation of his own.

Hanif Kureishi: The Indian man, the father loves Louie Armstrong.

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: As did my uncles in Karachi. The kids are turning away from all that. I first noticed that actually in the early '80s, my uncles, the older men would sit around drinking, listening to their Louie Armstrong records, and the kids, my cousins, my age then, would be going to the mosque. I remember them having conversations about Islam. I took it for granted in a way that young kids would be, like me, would be cynical about religion. I could see that they were starting to turn.

Hanif Kureishi: It's partly, it was disillusionment. I think they felt that they had been let down by ... capitalism hadn't brought them much, and communism in China nearby, and so on, hadn't done much for them either. They were beginning to organize. Where they organized actually was in the mosques. In the early '90s, after the fatwa Sep 29, 2001 11 against Rushdie I started to go to the mosques and I realized that the mosques were just right for political organization. That mosques weren't just like churches. People were discussing homosexuality, the place of women, the pure state in the Middle East. The Muslims were ... These were real political hotbeds.

Hanif Kureishi: I could see other ideologies didn't really stand a chance because the infrastructure was already there.

A.O. Scott: That's something that comes up also in your novel The Black Album, where the young man, who's the hero of that novel, is pulled in a way in these two direction. Sort of on the one hand toward the kind of Sammy and Rosie world of his music collection that he loves and the literature that he loves. And on the other hand he falls in with this very charismatic and persuasive group of Muslims. That takes place around the time of the fatwa against Rushdie.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. It's a cure for puzzlement. We liberals are always worrying about things, that we don't know the answers to anything. You never know what's the meaning of life, where are we going to go when we die, what should we do? We have a complete closed system, a complete ideology. It's wonderful. These guys knew everything. You'd ask them a question about ... Oh yeah, yeah, it was all in the book.

A.O. Scott: Clearly what the young man in My Son the Fanatic is longing for, in a way, and is longing in a way I think for a substitute father. He brings that religious leader into the house later on, into the movie, and installs him in his whiskey drinking, jazz loving father's house as a kind of slap in the face to.. .

Hanif Kureishi: The irony is that a lot of these mullahs, they come over but they don't actually want to go back to Pakistan.

A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: They start watching the cartoons, as he does in the films, and much as they like Pakistan they quite fancy staying in England and presumably in America as well. The patriotism doesn't always extend to wanting to live in the place they're patriotic about.

A.O. Scott: There's another, in a way the clip that's coming up from The Buddha of Suburbia, which sort of goes back from ... I guess we've moved from the Thatcher years forward into the Blair era, with My Son the Fanatic and with Intimacy. Now we sort of go back to the '70s, and we see a similar encounter between a kind of political certainty in the scene we're about to see, a way of looking at the world that assumes that it knows the answer, and what happens when that confronts the messiness and anarchy of real experience.

A.O. Scott: To set this up just a little bit, the hero of The Buddha of Suburbia, a young man named Karim, who's also the product of a mixed marriage, and he's come to London and he gets cast first in a sort of avant-garde version

Sep 29, 2001 12 of The Jungle Book, as Mowgli. Which he performs in a loincloth and black face really. And is spotted then my the director of this left wing theater collective who enlists him in this epic production of post colonialism.

A.O. Scott: He has to prepare a character, and we'll see what happens when he prepares the character.

Hanif Kureishi: It's the beginning of political correctness, I guess. We used to have these discussions in the '70s all the time about how you represented people, what your job as an artist was, and furthering the revolution, whether you were actually bringing the revolution nearer or further away by what you were doing with your work. And we really worried about these things and we talked about them all the time. And it became very inhibiting for writers then. Were you furthering the revolution with that piece or were you not? Et cetera, et cetera.

A.O. Scott: What's interesting, I think, also about this is the way that ... I was struck just watching the character of Anwar. What's happened just before the scene we saw is that his shop has been vandalized by racists. You have often simultaneously in your work these very serious, and dangerous, and frightening political events unfolding. You have it in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which opens with the police shooting of a black woman.

A.O. Scott: Then at the same time, or juxtaposed to that, this spirit of comedy and this sense that you can show these people and take very seriously the predicaments that they are in and the realities that they face, and also realize as Karim does, who I think is very fond of his uncle, that there's something comical about them.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. Yeah. Somebody said to me, that's your virtue and your flaw as a writer, that you are flippant. I take things seriously for a bit, and then can see how stupid they are and how funny they are.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess, in a way, life seems to me to be like that all the time as well. It is stupid, painful, incredibly serious, and very funny at the same time. Clearly you can see it as a child, you're aware of that all the time with your parents. They're ludicrous, but they are bigger than you, they're stronger than you. Sometimes my children, they just look at me and they just laugh. They just think that I'm stupid, foolish, and idiotic. But I'm also, if I want, I can really frighten them.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess I'm interested in the complexity of this, that things are daft, and mad, and stupid, and very serious. I guess it's part of the English tradition, I guess. I grew up clearly on Dickens. Not the books I must emphasize. The TV adaptations. Which are run continuously in England. You get a real sense of the grotesque, or satire, of stupidity and stuff. I guess that has kind of seeped into my work.

Hanif Kureishi: Also English TV comedy, which had a great ... You always wanted to say I was influenced by Goddard. In fact I was much more influenced by things like Dad's Army and Steptoe and Son and I Love Lucy than by Goddard. I grew up on comedy and I love comedy. But also want to write about serious things. I always try to find a way of smashing, banging those two things together.

Sep 29, 2001 13

A.O. Scott: Yeah. You have also, in the character of ... in The Buddha of Suburbia, of Changez, who becomes the substitute subject, the fellow who is the husband who Anwar has found for his daughter Jamila. Who's a classic buffoon. And yet there's a real tenderness also. He becomes, I think by the end, a very sympathetic and lovable character without losing his wonderful ridiculousness.

Hanif Kureishi: I love the idea ... when one of the children that I grew up with had an arranged marriage when she was 14 or 15 and I wrote about this in The Buddha, and I love the idea of there being an arranged marriage, the husband comes over, Changez, and then what really happens is he falls in love with his wife. Then he discovers she's a lesbian. Then she goes to live in a commune, in a collective, and he goes to live with her. These kind of absurdities.

A.O. Scott: Which are also ways of adapting between these different ... a sense that culture is not this sort of identity that you bring with you that's fixed, but this thing that you improvise and make, and a way of sort of making due with these absurd situations.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah.

A.O. Scott: Changez ends up basically taking over the care of his wife's baby by another man as a result of a brief affair before she decided she was a lesbian.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah.

A.O. Scott: And yet this arrangement, there's something that works about it.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah, yeah. Cultures are mixed already. I got turned onto American blues by listening to The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I didn't realize this was black people's music originally. Then I listened to The Stones, and I could see that these boys from Dartford, which was near where I lived, that it was all mixing up already. As a character in My Son the Fanatic says, "You can't stop it happening. And when you do, it's fascistic."

A.O. Scott: Yeah. I wonder, coming back full circle to Intimacy, we've seen in a way in these clips and we see in your work, in the films at least and also in the fiction, almost a kind of time lapse picture of London especially, and of England more generally, changing from the '70s up until the '90s. I'm struck looking at Intimacy, how the picture of London, even though this is now the more comfortably multicultural London perhaps, and certainly the more prosperous London of the present day, as compared to the '70s or the '80s, also seems in that movie to be a somewhat harsher, somewhat bleaker at least as reflected through the lives of these characters, place. Maybe that's not generally true, but what's your sense of how the city or maybe your relationship to it has changed? Sep 29, 2001 14

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. London seems to me to be changing, accelerating at an incredibly rapid pace, partly because of Britain's relationship with Europe. And so there are lots of immigrants, lots of refugees coming into London the whole time. The city's in a constant state of turmoil. In the old days the Asians would come over en masse and would integrate or assimilate in all kinds of ways. This seems to me like a permanent revolution happening constantly.

Hanif Kureishi: I think Patrice really gives a sense of this city really moving quickly now, and changing in terms of its racial turnover, incredibly rapidly. It isn't as if there was a stable population which then has to assimilate outsiders. The whole city seems to me to be made up now of outsiders in a way that I've never seen it before. I find that very interesting, and very exciting actually.

A.O. Scott: Yeah, yeah. The one thing that seems, in some ways also, and this may just be a difference in the kind of story it is, but in Intimacy it does seem that the politics has receded a little bit, at least as a central activity in the lives of these characters.

Hanif Kureishi: Until the other day there wasn't any politics. It was the end of politics. Politics has now returned to our lives. But for a while politics seemed to me to be in people's bodies, and seemed to be in people's sexuality. It seemed to me to be in the kitchen, or in the bedroom rather than in the world. That was quite interesting, because we always had argued that the sexual was political. What do people want to do with each other's bodies? Once we got away from ... Once we were sexually liberated, as it were, what were we going to do with one another then? What were we using each other's bodies to do? That seemed to interest Patrice and I for one, and this film, Intimacy was partly about that. What are other people's bodies for? What are we using them for? What is it to have a body? And all kinds of stuff like that.

A.O. Scott: I want actually to ... I don't want to leave this discussions without ... We've been talking about the films that you've written and that have been based on your work. You also have directed London Kills Me, which I think a lot of you saw. Yes? Cheers for London Kills Me.

A.O. Scott: Was that experience ... How was that different from being the screenwriter, and in whatever collaborative mode giving your work over to the director? What was it- Hanif Kureishi: Directing films and writing films are completely different jobs actually. There aren't many people who can do both those things. Bergman can just about do both. There aren't many people ... I guess can do both. But there aren't many people.

A.O. Scott: Sometimes.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. Neil Jordan as well sometimes can do both. I realized when I was directing London Kills Me that I didn't

Sep 29, 2001 15 have any experience. I'd be sitting on the set and they'd all come up to me and say, "What do you want now?" You think, "I haven't got the faintest idea."

Hanif Kureishi: Patrice Chéreau would know. Stephen Frears would know. I realized after making London Kills Me that I had to decide whether I wanted to learn to be a film director or not. And if I did then it meant that I would have to sacrifice a lot of writing time. You couldn't write short stories, essays, novels, et cetera, and be a movie director. I'd have gone insane.

Hanif Kureishi: So I decided not to carry on with that. Also, the directors I worked with were mostly better than me. I can't direct films better than Stephen Frears, but I can write them better than he can.

Hanif Kureishi: Also, directors take Intimacy ... it was good, Intimacy doesn't look like The Buddha of Suburbia, but they were written in a sense by the same person. That's exciting to me to see what other people can make of what I do.

Hanif Kureishi: I've had a good time. All the directors that I've worked with actually seem to me to have improved my work or brought stuff to it that seems interesting or worth doing. I've never had the feeling ... A lot of writers talk about being fucked over in Hollywood or this or that. Their work's been ruined by the people. Actually so far I actually haven't had that experience.

A.O. Scott: They seem to ... especially I think The Buddha of Suburbia seems to move from the page to the screen. It seems to be equally at home in both media. You don't feel like you're watching an adaptation in the sense that it's sort of a-

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah, it's hard to do.

A.O. Scott: ... distortion.

Hanif Kureishi: It was hard to do that, because it's a first person novel. A.O. Scott: Right.

Hanif Kureishi: When Roger Michell and I first adapted the novel we had tons and tons of voiceover. We couldn't solve the problem of how to get this point of view. Otherwise we kept thinking, well the guy's just going to be standing there watching other people doing things. So we had to work very hard actually to make it work as a third person form.

A.O. Scott: The other thing that is interesting about your work is that it lends itself so well to being acted. I mean if people Sep 29, 2001 16 have seen this retrospective it's just sort of one extraordinary performance after another. Whether it's , or Daniel Day-Lewis, or certainly Mark Rylance and in this, and down to the smallest performances too. Down to the incidental performances.

A.O. Scott: Do you think when you're writing, and there's also something in your prose that's very vivid, do you think when you're writing about how it will look, about it being acted? Not necessarily about a particular actor, but about how it would sound and look on the screen.

Hanif Kureishi: I was going to say that I like actors for a moment, but actually I don't like actors. They make me insane. I guess I'm interested in character, in what other people are like, and somehow capturing character and the oddness of people Dickensian sense that you can sum people up quite quickly. I think I'm interested in that. And I'm interested in eccentricity as well. I'm interested in absurdity. That's a way of summing people up quite quickly. You have a left wing theater director who's caught between two black people arguing and he doesn't know what the hell to do, and he's left wing, and he's really stuck trying to make a radical play. That seems to me to be a good situation.

Hanif Kureishi: You can see that the guy's really straining to figure out what's going on.

A.O. Scott: Right. And then he says, "Because I said so."

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. Yeah. He's a democrat, and you all sit around, and you would discuss things in the end. He says, "I'm the boss here." I like that kind of stuff, but it's about character. I guess when I write I always start with the people. I have all these characters. And then I try to make a plot. That's why the plots often in my stuff are rather wayward. They go off here and they go off there. Because I'm really much more interested in the people than in the plot.

A.O. Scott: You do seem to like to work with and through large groups of people. You have, certainly in My Beautiful Laundrette, let's say or Buddha of Suburbia, you have the hero sort of moving through these mazes, and networks, and cousins, and uncles, and school friends, and extended family. That seem, yeah, to give it this real complexity and liveliness, so you feel I think watching these that you're really watching as much of life as can fit on the screen.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. I think it's because ... Well when I was a kid I liked 19th century French novels. I liked writers like Balzac, for instance. Balzac would have a serving person, and he'd have king, and have an aristocrat. I loved the idea that you could have a whole range of society. And the model was it would be a young man who'd be moving, usually in social sects of marriage and money throughout this. That was the kind of model, not really for my books, but for my life I think.

Hanif Kureishi: You start in the suburbs and you end up in the House of Lords. That's where I'm going, man. On the journey Sep 29, 2001 17 you run into all kinds of other people. I love the idea ... Someone once said to me, "The thing about Dickens is he knew everybody in London." He'd know judges and poor people, and so on. I like the idea that all these things are connected by people somehow, by someone moving through society.

A.O. Scott: Yeah. I think we do have some time for questions to throw it open to the audience here. It's a little hard to see with the light. Oh, that's good. Yeah, so right in the middle there. Yeah.

Speaker 5: I was curious after, having seen a few films and the retrospective a couple years back, my now fiance and I went to see the film East is East, and we saw Om Puri in that film, and then here again in My Son the Fanatic. And I don't want to denigrate another film, we enjoyed it, at moments it's a little bit overly emotional at times, but I felt after watching this I was curious if you had had any interaction with that film, because it seemed to be sort like a Kureishi-lite after having seen the things in your retrospective.

Speaker 5: When I look back at East is East a lot of the same themes were touched upon, but it was in this kind of devil may care way, and it was sort of melodrama packed into two hours. I don't know, it paled in comparison and I was curious-

Hanif Kureishi: Oddly enough-

A.O. Scott: Sorry. I have to repeat the questions, because the audience is not mic'd. Sorry. The question was about this film East is East, which is based on a play, I believe written by the actor who played Sammy in Sammy and Rosie.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah, yeah, he was the boy in the clip from Sammy and Rosie.

A.O. Scott: That was a film that also has Om Puri in it, and that touches on many of the similar themes. I guess the question was what you had to do with the movie, and what you think of it in relation to your own work.

Hanif Kureishi: Before My Beautiful Laundrette, and I wanted to write for television because I wanted money, I would go to television companies and say ... say like the BBC, and I would say, "I want to write a film for your company about an Asian family, et cetera, about a boy," all that stuff. They would say to me, "Well, we're not going to do films about Asian families because no one's interested in Asian families." And it was very, very hard for me to break into television because minority programming, people wouldn't go for it. Asian people were invisible. These stories weren't going to be told. It was really hard.

Hanif Kureishi: I remember winning an award and the guy giving me a check, and he said, "We really like your writing, but why don't you write about English people?" I have never forgotten that to this day. It was tough.

Sep 29, 2001 18

Hanif Kureishi: Then My Beautiful Laundrette got through, and since then there have been other writers, and directors, and actors, and you cast an Asian film now and tons of Asian actors come in. In the old days two actors would come in. It would be one or the other.

Hanif Kureishi: When we were casting My Beautiful Laundrette the actors would come in, Stephen Frears would say, "Look, when you come in bring all your friends." They'd be in it too. Now it's different, and there are lots of films, Baj on the Beach, East is East. There's lots of Asian music as I'm sure you know.

Hanif Kureishi: It's kind of changed. I'm rather pleased that it ... I didn't like East is East, and I guess I would say it's probably a rip off of my stuff. That used to drive me crazy. I'd go to Italy to promote one of my books and the first question would always be, "What do you think of East is East?" It would make you insane.

A.O. Scott: Yes. Sorry.

Hanif Kureishi: It's a tribute to the fact that there are other Asian and black minority artists now working, and that's quite a big deal in England.

A.O. Scott: I think the question was there. Yeah.

Speaker 6: One of the characters in the clip you showed was saying to Karim, with regard to the way that he was portraying an Indian character, this is the way white people want to see us. For that reason they were turning him away from doing his scene. What is the conversation that occurs in your mind through your writing about what will be the perception of people outside the South Asian community, if any?

A.O. Scott: The question was, referring to the scene that we saw from Buddha of Suburbia, in which the character Tracy accuses Karim of seeing, of portraying Asians as white people see them, the question is, how does the dialogue take place in your mind about how people outside of the South Asian community might perceive your work and might perceive the South Asian characters in it?

Hanif Kureishi: Which people?

Speaker 6: Actually for me in particular, being of South Asian origin, sometimes, although I really enjoy seeing characters which I really can relate to, occasionally, especially growing up in a very white community like Minneapolis I'd wonder like, "I wonder what the white community thinks of this. Are we generating stereotypes?" Which doesn't mean that's not important to bring towards the light, but rather that I just wish I could see the little bubble over everyone's head, like what are they thinking when they see this ... especially not having had exposure to the greater South Asian community. Sep 29, 2001 19

Hanif Kureishi: I don't know what you could do about that as an artist. You're sitting at your desk trying to write and you're thinking, "What are people outside the South Asian community going to think about this?" It would just do your head in. You couldn't work in that way. It would be impossible. It would be like having sex, being watched by your mother.

Hanif Kureishi: These ideas would make you so uptight that you wouldn't be able to work at all. I think as an artist you have to work in some kind of freedom. You can never know what people are going to make of your work. A racist is going to look at your work and say, "These people are scum." Somebody else is going to look at it and go, "Right on." Then there are going to be a whole range of reactions throughout the whole community and at different times. Somebody looking at it in the '80s isn't going to look at it in the same way as they are in 10 years time, for instance.

Hanif Kureishi: Our fantasies about what people are going to make of our work could be very inhibiting for you as a writer. I think you have to write to the best of your ability to tell the truth as you see it. Also to try, to the best of your ability, to make your characters seem real and believable and human, and that you're writing your work, your film should be humane. That you aren't just mocking people, making them look idiotic. But people do do idiotic things. The Asian community is as idiotic as any other community. We are as funny, as serious, as tragic, as sad, as this and that as any other community. We can't do advertising for the Asian community and say, "Look, South Asian community, we're really nice people." For a writer, that would be hopeless. We are as nice and as not nice as anybody else.

Hanif Kureishi: I think artistic freedom in that sense is much more important for our whole community rather than trying to idealize ourselves. We should make the work completely uninteresting to people.

A.O. Scott: Is there another ... Yes, right down here.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I wanted to ...

A.O. Scott: The question is basically I guess commenting on your insight into the workings of the adolescent mind. I guess where in your mind that comes from.

Hanif Kureishi: I was adolescent for a long, long time. I can remember when it changed. I remember when I wasn't an adolescent. I was writing a story for the New Yorker called My Son the Fanatic and my first two children, are twins, had just been born. And when I was writing the story it was about a young man who becomes a Muslim fundamentalist, et cetera. As I was writing the story I began to realize I was much more interested in the father than the son. At that moment I turned and I realized ... My father had just died as well, and I realized then that I was no longer an adolescent. I was on the other side. I was the adult in The Catcher in the Rye. And I could no longer laugh at the adults, to see them as being big and absurd. I was big and absurd myself. And my point of view began to shift. I moved into middle aged. Sep 29, 2001 20

Hanif Kureishi: It was at that moment when I began to write about older people, and I began to see and find younger people alien and their music odd, and all of that stuff. That's what happens. I was adolescent for ages, and ages. Really until the end of my 30s. I still lived as if it was the '60s. The sense of pleasure just going on and on and on. And believe me, there were certain experiences I could have that would make me happy forever, if I could sustain them long enough.

A.O. Scott: How would you relate that to the character in Intimacy, who's very ... one difference between that movie maybe and some of the earlier work is that his experience of sexuality is very different, let's say, from Karim's or certainly-

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah. He's not just having fun, he's not just having a good time. This isn't emotional athletics for him. This was much more despair, and really the desire to leave himself behind, or to cure himself, or to use another person as a drug, or to reach another person in some really significant way.

Hanif Kureishi: Whereas someone like Karim in The Buddha of Suburbia would've enjoyed casual and promiscuous sex just as fun, just as pleasure. The guy in Intimacy is really trying to contact somebody else in order to save his life. And there's a really difference there. Yeah. Intimacy's a much darker film. There's fun, there's humor in Intimacy. It's partly because the director is French, but also because the characters are middle aged.

A.O. Scott: Yeah. Yes, up there. Yeah. You, sir. Yeah.

Speaker 8: Who? Me?

A.O. Scott: Yes. You're ... Sorry.

Speaker 8: The end of the film My Beautiful Laundrette was a little confusing to me. I don't know what really happened to the daughter, the daughter of Saeed Jaffrey in the film. There are two trains that come by, she is standing on the platform and a flash second later she's not there.

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah.

Speaker 8: Did she get on the train or did she fall onto the tracks?

Hanif Kureishi: Yeah.

Sep 29, 2001 21

Speaker 8: I always wanted to ask you that.

Hanif Kureishi: Okay.

A.O. Scott: The question is, what happens at the end of My Beautiful Laundrette? What happens in particular to the character, the daughter of Saeed Jaffrey, the cousin of Omar?

Hanif Kureishi: The answer is British Rail wouldn't let us film on the platform. It's a nightmare making films in Britain. They wouldn't let us. There was going to be another shot of her getting in the train. They wouldn't let us film on public property, and their property, and so on. So we wanted to go back and get the shot, but we couldn't afford to go back.

Hanif Kureishi: So Stephen Frears, when we cut it together it was like that, and there was going to be another shot that was going to ... et cetera. We never got the other shot, and so Stephen just left it like that. People to this day, 20 years later, still ask questions about what happened. But actually that's what happened. It's become ... I don't know why Stephen Frears left it like that either. He just did. I think it seems mysterious or symbolic in some way, but that's what happened I'm afraid.

A.O. Scott: That's often the case with the greatest mysteries of cinema have the most practical answers. Yeah, over there.

Speaker 9: I'm curious if you saw Jonathan Harvey's take on the London and sexuality in Closer to Heaven, and if you have any thoughts on that.

Hanif Kureishi: I haven't seen it yet, to be honest. No. I've heard it's good. Frances Barber's in it, who's in Sammy and Rosie, so I will go and see it. Yeah.

A.O. Scott: Okay, yes. Right there.

Speaker 10: I have a question about Rushdie. Since you were both writers tackling similar issues, how do you see your own writing in contrast to his writing or have you ever postulated yourself in such a comparison?

A.O. Scott: The question is how you see yourself in relation to , and his work.

Sep 29, 2001 22

Hanif Kureishi: He's an Indian writer for a start. He really does come from India. Has lived in Indian and in Pakistan. I've always been a brown Englishman in a sense. He loves all that South American, and magic realism and all that. I remember thinking, I can't do magic realism because there wasn't ... in Bromley in South London there was never any magic. It was just fucking realism every day.

Hanif Kureishi: Our takes on the world, although we're mates and kind of know each other, and our families know each other, our takes on the world and our way of seeing the world are really quite different. When I was a young man starting out he was very supportive of me. He could be also rather sarcastic. He'd go, "You only write screenplays. Why don't you write a novel like a proper writer?" He would say to me once. So I went and wrote The Buddha of Suburbia and that kind of sprung me into action.

Hanif Kureishi: I can't say that there are any similarities really between us, apart from the fact that we're both Indian.

A.O. Scott: Yes, up there on the aisle. Yeah.

Speaker 11: One of the things that I've always enjoyed in your work is the centrality or the very matter of factness of queer characters. Certainly in My Beautiful Laundrette the two main characters [inaudible] and all these people transgressing these kind of sexual boundaries. Something that struck me is in My Beautiful Laundrette, for instance, there's still this sense of danger around being queer. And then you get to Intimacy where very casually the other bartender just says, "Oh, I see a handsome guy. Let's cut off the conversation right now because something better has come up."

Speaker 11: I'm just curious about how ... I'd like to hear your thoughts on just how this idea of queerness has been an integral part of your work in writing.

Hanif Kureishi: Okay. A.O. Scott: The question basically is about the place of queer sexuality broadly defined in your work. And how it's changed over the years.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess partly because of ... I worked in the theater in the '70s and there were theater groups like Gay Sweatshop around. There weren't in the early '80s. There weren't really any gay films. Or if there were gay films you had to have Dirk Bogarde in them. Dirk Bogarde always committed suicide or died at the end as well.

Hanif Kureishi: Of course, the gay stuff was really emerging. In the '70s we would go to gay clubs all the time and hang around with transvestites. We were punks. Those worlds weren't separate in those days. It seemed to me quite natural to have two guys kissing in a film, but in fact it was a big deal then. And when these two guys Sep 29, 2001 23 kissed it was a shocking moment. It was rather wonderful. You never thought that suddenly a gay skinhead and a gay Pakistani running a launderette together would suddenly kiss, and in this rather romantic way.

Hanif Kureishi: It was shocking then, and I rather loved the idea of that. And the idea that queerness or gayness would never be mentioned. That they just kissed and it wasn't a big deal. That seemed to me to be rather liberating and kind of radical then. Now in British television gay and lesbian people kiss all the time. You can't turn on the television without seeing gay people kissing, which I like. In those days it seemed to me to be an important gesture, that it was just a natural, ordinary kind of daily thing, and was romantic. Yeah, or just seemed part of life rather than being made into a kind of issue, as it were.

A.O. Scott: Yes, there. Up in the back, is there ... yeah.

Speaker 12: Yeah, I was just kind of curious ... certainly there is a- [audio skip] whole western culture.

A.O. Scott: The question is, is what you think would be the impact of the rise of multiculturalism in movies and I guess in the other arts of the kind that's typified in your work, in Spike Lee, and all of the explosion of work from authors of other ... non-Western or non-white-

Hanif Kureishi: I guess what you do is you learn about other people's lives. You learn about other people's worlds. You go, I see those people on the street are going to their shops, and now I know what goes on, what their lives are like. That seems to me to be very interesting. I'm not interested, I don't like tolerance. I'm not interested in tolerance. I don't want to live in a tolerant society. I want to live in a society in which people actually like each other and don't just put up with each other. And actually they get to know one another. I guess culture's one of the places where we do get to think about ourselves, and get to think about the way other people are. I want to see films about the weirdest, strangest, queerest, oddest corners of the world.

Hanif Kureishi: Usually those filmmakers, those artists, those musicians, they usually have the most energy. It's the stuff on the outside, and then it moves into the inside and it gets to be normal, and you're not interesting anymore, but there's somebody else out there who's telling you stories from somewhere that you've never heard before. And you go, "Wow, yeah. I want to know about that, or learn about that." That's, I guess, one of the things that literature culture does is tell us stories about people from far away, and we begin to see that they're rather like us.

A.O. Scott: There's another ... Over there.

Speaker 13: Do you have any comments on the predicament that Pakistan finds itself in today between and Afghanistan?

Sep 29, 2001 24

A.O. Scott: The question is about the current situation of Pakistan in light of recent events, I guess after the September 11th attacks, and its position between the US and Afghanistan.

Hanif Kureishi: I can see that Pakistan is in a pretty difficult position, because there's a large and quite militant population in Pakistan, and the mosques, and the mullahs, and the movies, and the Islamicist are very powerful. On the other hand, a good deal of the population also wants to live in a liberal democracy. And I think that this crisis is going to bring out a real tear in the country between these two points of view, whether the country's going to really become a complete theocratic state like Iran, or can move to some kind of democracy.

Hanif Kureishi: There never has been democracy in Pakistan. It's a kind of benighted country. And it seems to me that it was founded on a hopeless idea, which is that you build a country on religious principles. It's very difficult to get much liberalism in there. But in a sense liberalism is going to help those people.

Hanif Kureishi: I have no idea what's going to happen, but I think it could be terrible. There could be a real conflict between those people who want liberalism, who want democracy, and particularly on behalf of the women. Because I could see that my aunts, who are running magazines, who, one of my cousins was an airline pilot, they were very sophisticated women, and when the Islamicists moved in these women couldn't go out of the house. They were losing their jobs. They felt they were really being pushed down the social scale. I really worry, particularly for the women, for instance who under Islam don't have a good time at all.

Hanif Kureishi: I hope that the west does something to liberate the country rather than to oppress it further.

A.O. Scott: Yes, in the middle there.

Speaker 14: What happens next to Jay and Claire?

A.O. Scott: The question is, what happens next to Jay and to Claire, the main characters in Intimacy? I assume you mean after the movie, not after the one scene that we saw. Which as you remember is the first of several copulations.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess one of the things I've been interested in as a writer is in marriage, or in how you sustain a relationship with somebody else for a long time without killing them, and without having them kill you. How the hell do you do that? I guess these people are kind of ... they've come out of that. They're in some kind of despair. When your marriage has failed you really lose confidence. You're really crashing. You don't know what to believe in, where you are, what you're doing, et cetera, et cetera.

Hanif Kureishi: Sep 29, 2001 25

I think Jay is probably in that situation. And I like to think that after a bit he would rebuild his confidence and try to get into a relationship having learned from the other one. That's what I would like to think. In the end what we want is to be close to other people. The film's called Intimacy, because in the end the most satisfying thing in life is being close to other people. Not only being loved by them, but loving them too. That is the ultimate dream of all of us in some sense.

Hanif Kureishi: I guess Jay is unhappy because he doesn't have that. I would like to think that after a bit he would get into a position where he might be able to do that.

Hanif Kureishi: Just one more question.

A.O. Scott: Yes, you sir. Yeah, one more.

Speaker 15: I wanted to come back for a minute to the question of London. It seems to me in the earlier films that London is a space that's imbued with meaning. Sort of Thatcherism, and the demise of the GLC, and people squatting, and racial politics, and so on. And the London we saw last night in Intimacy is very grotty, and it's charmingly grotty the way London is, but it's very anomic. I didn't feel meaning in the space itself. And I actually wasn't able to track the geography. They passed through the Elephant and Castle Tube Station at one point, and maybe it's on Clapham Common where she has the conversation with Maryanne Faisal, but I couldn't put the geography together.

Speaker 15: If the slick bar that he works at is in Chelsea, he's going the wrong way across the bridge towards the Chelsea Power Station. Maybe that's just a difference from one director to another, but it also felt to me like a historical difference, like we really lost the sense of this place being a meaningful space where some important struggle is being worked out. That might even have to do with the situation of the characters too.

A.O. Scott: The question has to do with the change in how London is perceived from the earlier work where it's a space that's full of political struggle and meaning to Intimacy where the characters see much more adrift, and where indeed even the geography of the city, from someone who obviously knows it quite well, is hard to track.

Hanif Kureishi: French director. By which I mean seriously that I don't think ... Patrice Chéreau came to London, he lived in London, he loves London. I think he shot London really well. It looks like the London actually that I live in. It's a very beautiful picture. I don't think Patrice was interested in the gradations of the city, or could get to grasp that in a way that if you live in a city you know that in that street, that street, that street, and over there there are real differences, because you walk them every day.

Hanif Kureishi: I could do that in my district, just as you can do that in your district. I don't think Patrice could do that, and I don't think he was able to do that. I don't think he understood, could understand, it's impossible to understand class difference, for instance. That would be a mystery to somebody else just as French society would be a Sep 29, 2001 26 mystery to me. I think that he couldn't be interested in that in the same way, and show the city as being rather beautiful at times, but kind of anonymous in the way that you suggest. And couldn't invest each space with meaning in the way that somebody who knew the city well could do.

Hanif Kureishi: He saw the city freshly, and he loved the light, and he makes it look beautiful. It works both ways in a sense with a foreign director. The overall impression is going to be, let's say, less precise than it would be with somebody who knew the area.

Speaker 15: Is it also possible that the space just is less meaningful than it was in the mid '70s?

Hanif Kureishi: No, I don't think . No. No. Meaning is what you put in, not what's there already. You find it, you make it, you build it, you create it.

A.O. Scott: All right. I think on that apt note we thank you all for coming, and thank you Hanif for coming.

Hanif Kureishi: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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