British connection

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">BAFTA award winning director Asif Kapadia and UK-based director Udayan Prasad talk to Khushnuma Dadachanji about making films in the UK. <br /><br />Asif Kapadia''s won the BAFTA award for his debut full-length feature film <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The Warrior</span>, considered one of the finest films out of UK.But he''s pretty humble and says, "I''m pretty inexperienced compared to all the other Indian film directors working there."<br />He''s shot extensively in Rajasthan and the Himalayas. As for his Indian touch, Kapadia remarks, "I''m not necessarily influenced only by Bollywood. Apart from Indian cinema, I''ve been influenced as much by French or Japanese films." <br /><br />Asif recalls the time they were filming <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The Warrior</span>, which took him about five years to make, "I had been working on the film for really long, prior to shooting. On the first day of the shoot in Rajasthan, I thought I had forgotten how to shoot!"<br /><br />But the hard work paid off, and <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The Warrior </span>was submitted as UK''s official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards.<br /><br />He remarks "With <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The Warrior</span>, we proved to people that the film could work despite a new director and non-professional actors."<br /><br />He explained, "In fact, one of our main actors was Noor Mani, a street kid from the Salaam Balak Trust in Delhi." <br /><br />He''s also made a number of short films, including his graduation film <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The Sheep Thief </span>which won an award at the Cannes Film festival. On the tradition of short films which exists in UK, Kapadia remarks that there is no system of an assistant director there. <br /><br />"It''s quite unlike the system here in India where the AD (assistant director) has a creative license. Thus, in the UK, it is better for younger directors to make short films and learn from their mistakes, rather than spend five years on a single feature and realise that it didn''t work."</div> </div>