Weddings and Beheadings

The evolution of the script itself might be compared to an unplanned birth. I stayed in touch with Hanif Kureishi after he appeared in a documentary I made for the BBC a couple of years ago called 'British, Paki, and Proud'. We met up in local cafes where we started discussing various ideas for films. I'd always been interested in his work, not least some of his essays such as 'The Rainbow Sign', which seemed like a confessional diary to me about his evolution from a boy in the suburbs to a writer. Although I was running around with a small camera at the time, filming an observational documentary about the London Underground, I shared my fantasy feature film ideas with him. He listened patiently.

After I admitted I'd never done a drama before, and that these half-formed ideas were strictly playing away inside my head, he suggested we worked together on a short film.

The next day, I received an email. It was the first draft of 'Weddings and Beheadings' – an idea of his we'd been discussing about a frustrated filmmaker coerced into filming beheadings. It read like a short story, but seemed to lend itself to a dramatic monologue. I envisaged different textures of filming. It seemed to work on more than one level, transcending the obvious and touching the metaphorical. I could read into it my own political view that like the fictional filmmaker, we have all somehow been coerced...that the Blair/Bush misadventure has created a world that is far worse than it has to be. Yet, there is humour in the darkness...and there is also hope".