'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.
I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.
DVDs have their place, but the cinema is a tangible, emotional experience that I would hate my children not to have.
For British cinema to survive, you really need a British film culture, and it's got to start down there, with young kids watching films in the cinema - so they can be transported to a different world.
I was a good Indian girl, but naughty in that I would often sneak out of the back door and into the garden and go off with my friends when I should have been at home cooking or cleaning.
All my films are about kind of being seen to be one thing when you're actually something else, and the power of the female spirit to make things work your way on your terms. Which is what I do.
Britain has nurtured me and made me able to make movies that have travelled round the world.
I am not afraid to be a pioneer. When a door is ajar, you need to open it fully. And once you are in that room, you need to see what other doors there might be and where they might lead.
The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.
If you tell me I can't do something, that's the worst thing to tell me. And that's what I tell girls, and what Beckham's about: you can do it, you can do it better, and you can do it in the way you want.
I remember a picture on the front page of the 'Sun' during the Brixton riots: a rasta guy with a petrol bomb, and a headline saying something like: 'The Future of Britain.' And I thought: 'Wow! Look at the power of that image,' and I wanted to get behind the camera to make these people three-dimensional.
You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.
If you want to be a director, work with writers and find different ways of telling stories with film, then do a course. This way you can consolidate what you've learnt and use the course to go further.
One of the things I want to do with 'Desi Rascals' is go a bit deeper into the characters and their family lives and have a bit more heart and a bit more inter-generational story-telling, so it's not all about young people.
'Viceroy' is the first British film about the Raj and the transfer of power from Britain to India made by a British Indian director. It is a British film made from an Indian perspective.
My pregnancy was great, but the last three weeks were manic because my blood pressure was going up and up.
I saw 'Billy Elliot' again, and what I loved about it was the way it had become a social document, a reminder of what happened with the mining communities in the '80s. And I thought, 'Everyone keeps wanting me to make a sequel to 'Beckham,' but maybe a musical remake is the answer, embracing all this theatricality.'
The great thing about musicals is that they transcend race.
I went to L.A., and I was on two different studio movies at Fox and Sony, but they were never made in the end. When the second one wasn't happening, I ended up doing an episode of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for the BBC, and went on a roots trip from England to Kenya, India, and pre-partition India in Pakistan, where my family originally came from.
Constantly, I've been asked to make a sequel to 'Beckham.' However, I thought a West End show was the proper way to go. Once we made the show, I wanted to make sure that I embraced the West End genre rather than just put the film on stage.
