The director Sarah Gavron would be the first to admit that, for a first-time feature film-maker, bringing Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane to the screen was a task fraught with challenges. How do you condense such a sprawling, richly detailed tapestry into a film of under two hours? How do you bring to life a central character whose thoughts and whose personality are, in the book, largely internalised? And how, in these times of heightened sensitivity, do you approach a story that could potentially cause offence in the very community in which it is set?

It’s this last concern that has arguably caused Gavron the most headaches, most recently in the cancellation of the film’s Royal Performance screening, which was to have taken place in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. The official line was that the performance was cancelled because of scheduling conflicts but it is rumoured that the U-turn from Clarence House was prompted by fears of protests about the allegedly negative portrayal of the community.

Watching it instead at The Times BFI London Film Festival, it was hard to find much itself never becomes the capricious supporting character in the film that it is in the book.

If anything, the film is overcautious. Obviously controversial scenes have been toned down, for example a climactic dash in which Nanzeen pursues her fleeing daughter. In the book, the backdrop is a riot on Brick Lane; in the film it is set against the commuter bustle of Liverpool Street station.

Gavron, however, strongly denies that any of the script decisions were made with that in mind. “We knew that there had been some controversy when the book came out. But we didn’t let it affect the creative process in any way. I wouldn’t have been involved in this project at all if I had been interested in side-stepping politics. I would have done a broad romantic comedy.” The decision about the riot scene was not about avoiding the political, she maintains. “We had the riot in lots of drafts and it didn’t quite fit dramatically. If you read the book, you don’t think of community politics as dominating it, you think of the story of a woman. An image goes a long way in film – an image of a meeting of men with beards says a lot. The book has dozens of love scenes, we’ve got four.” that could warrant controversy. In adapting the story, Gavron and her team excised most of the book’s subplots to focus on the central character Nanzeen (played by the luminous Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee). The approach is subjective; the cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s fluid camerawork gives the impression that the story is filtered through the eyes of a woman who grows more confident as the film progresses. However, since Nanzeen spends so much of her time surrounded by the four walls of her Hackney flat, Brick Lane Gavron stresses that the production was welcomed by most of the Brick Lane community, with legions of young people queueing to be extras. That said,veiled threats from a vocal minority led to the production moving from Brick Lane to a set for key scenes.

“The thing is, it only takes one person to implicitly threaten violence. As a film director you have an unwieldy amount of people and you are putting them out on to the street. So for that reason, we continued making the film the way we wanted to make it, but we relocated.” Gavron, whose background includes documentary film-making and a stint at the National Film and Television School in London, first read Brick Lane with no thought of making it into a film. “I read it when everyone else had their heads buried in it on the London Underground. It was really striking that the people you would see reading it would be men, older women, young teens – the whole range. The same reason that it appealed to me was the reason it appealed to those people. It wasn’t about them and us. It was about people you could relate to and lives you could connect with.”

Inevitably, almost everyone who read and enjoyed the book will have expectations of what the film should be and which story elements the film should include. Gavron says wryly: “Adaptations take different approaches. You’re damned if you include it all and you’re damned if you don’t in some ways. We went through so many drafts – into the 30s. And for a long time we had a big section in 1985. Then quite late on, we just cut out 40 pages and made it the story of 2001, because that was when her change started.” Early reactions to the film suggest that the intimate, introspective approach strikes a chord with audiences. Brick Lane won the Audience Award at the Dinard Film Festival in France. And, after a screening at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, Gavron was approached by a woman in her seventies. “Her son said, ‘My mother wants to give you a kiss because you put her life on the screen.’ ”

Brick Lane is released nationwide on Friday, Nov 16

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