EAST IS EAST, West is West and though the twain converged in the Southall cinemas of Gurinder Chadha’s childhood, even then she knew the difference. “It was very extreme because Bollywood was over here, Hollywood musicals were over there and also on the telly. I used to really love Saturday and Sunday afternoon British black and white films,” the 43-year-old film-maker confides over lunch in Soho.

“With the Bollywood movies I didn’t actually understand a lot of what was being said because I couldn’t understand Hindi, but it was incredible how I still sort of responded to them: the music, the colour, the dancing, the humour. You don’t always actually need to know what is going on.”

Chadha’s response to this kind of Indian cinema and the veritable masala of movie influences has certainly helped to shape the follow-up to her sleeper smash hit, Bend It Like Beckham. Pushing Beckham’s Asian fusion mix even further, Chadha has taken something quintessentially English — a Jane Austen novel — and draped it in lavish, all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood glamour. The result? Bride & Prejudice (see review).

“I didn’t want to make a pure Bollywood film for an Indian audience,” she explains. “Other people do that and do it really well. I wanted to make a film using the Hindi film language and aim it at people who didn’t know what Bollywood was, who lived in the suburbs and cities all over the world.” Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an accessible way in. The idea of families arranging mutually beneficial status marriages translates smoothly to its new setting — 19th-century Hertfordshire’s unmarried Bennet sisters and meddling mother become the hard-up Bakshis from contemporary Amritsar. The suitors Bingley and Darcy are respectively a second-generation British Asian and a wealthy American hotelier, while the dastardly Wickham is a backpacker looking for an exotic fling.

Chadha and her partner and co-screenwriter, Paul Mayeda Berges, not only decked out their version in typical Bollywod opulence but sent their storyline globetrotting from Goa to LA to Chadha’s Southall. “It was only when everyone suddenly came together that we realised it was such a massive undertaking,” Chadha recalls.

Adding to the film’s complexity was her decision to cast indigenous actors. Hence British Asian actors (Naveen Andrews) mixed with Bollywood icons (the former Miss World Aishwarya Rai) and new Hollywood (Martin Henderson, star of The Ring and Torque), each with their own cultural viewpoints and acting styles.

“It was three different worlds coming together,” Chadha says, “so I was speaking a different English with everybody, because the references were all different. But that fitted the film.”

Henderson, a New Zealander, cheerfully admits that, when cast, he hadn’t even heard of Aishwarya Rai, and that his only previous Bollywood experience came as a young backpacker watching TV in an Indonesian bus station. “Warriors were run- ning around chopping people’s heads off and then out of nowhere silk sari-clad women popped up from behind boulders and all the guys started swinging the women around, gazing into their eyes and singing these Indian songs.” He chuckles. “So my first encounter was very confusing.”

Chadha wants to counter such preconceptions. “That’s also why I chose to do it now, because I felt Bollywood was being hijacked in a particular way,” she says. “People were focusing on the really kitschy side of it. Yes, there is a lot of kitsch and it is formula, but at the same time there’s a wonderful purity of emotion and a lot about it that’s brilliant. I wanted to do something that paid homage to some of the films that were very much part of who I was as a film-maker.”

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