Best of both worlds

Bringing together a stellar cast for What’s Love Got To Do With It, director Shekhar Kapur says Azmi’s disciplined approach perfectly offset Thompson’s spontaneity

One might be tempted to label What’s Love Got To Do With It? as a classic rom-com. But director Shekhar Kapur doesn’t quite think so. “The film asks questions about what love is, where it comes from, [and the role of] family in the modern-day existence,” begins the director. For the cross-cultural love story that travels from London to Lahore, he has brought together a stellar cast, comprising Shabana Azmi, Emma Thompson, Lily James, Sajal Aly and Shazad Latif.

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Working with Thompson and Azmi, two actors at the top of their game, is an experience Kapur will treasure for long. “While I have worked with Shabana before [in Masoom], Emma is an iconic actor. So initially, I was wondering how to deal with it. Emma was so welcoming, and spoke admiringly about my earlier films like Bandit Queen [1994]. She is fantastic as a comic actor — she would do something impromptu and bring her own dialogues into the scene, and I would burst out laughing,” he recounts. Azmi’s approach towards her craft, he says, is different. “Shabana sticks to the script all the time, but innovates a lot within it. She created her own character, after a lot of discussions about who Aisha Khan is, her graph, and what happened to her before the story starts.”

Emma Thompson in the film

While most filmmakers and actors place emphasis on workshops, Kapur didn’t pack in too many rehearsals. “Too many rehearsals ultimately dull the performance. With Emma and Shabana, we’d get the perfect shot in the first three takes. The moment I said ‘cut’, the two would go back to laughing and being best friends.”

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Adjudged the Best Comedy Film at the Rome Film Festival, What’s Love Got To Do With It? tells the story of a British woman who falls in love with a South Asian man. It’s easy to see that screenwriter Jemima Goldsmith — who fell in love with and married Imran Khan, former prime minister of Pakistan, in the mid-1990s — borrowed elements from her life, for the movie. “Jemima has had a lot of experiences in Lahore as she got married there. When I read the script, I thought it’s far deeper than a rom-com. Jemima gave [us] space to explore ourselves in a story that she wrote.”

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