Did you have any reservations about doing a second film? But very quickly, once you examine the circumstances – a) we all had a fantastic time making it, and b) the first film, without getting into semantics, was a sort of beginning rather than an ending because they had made a quite brave choice about their lives, as their lives ahead of them shortened, to go to this place and start again somehow. At the end of the first movie they are of course starting again, deciding to stay. And so, actually the door was wide open for a continuation of that story, and I think that’s what made the difference on me particularly, the writer and I and Graham [Broadbent] the producer. Lastly, though it’s a privilege to be able to go back into that world and write for those people now, alongside an audience that already has a relationship with them. You worry about whether you’re going to disappoint and somehow let the first film down by making one that’s not as good – as in the ‘quit while you’re ahead’ analogy – but it was up to us to bet on ourselves rather than betting against ourselves, and we just moved steadily along that path. When we’d finished the script I thought, this is a really strong film. It remains to be seen whether others agree with that, but we felt happy that we’d done it. It was pretty much everywhere that it happened. Two things were odd – one was that it seemed to work regardless of borders. I’m sure there are exceptions to that but I’m not so aware of them. It just worked incredibly well and, while you might have expected that in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, the combined grosses in those countries were bigger than the American domestic gross, which is very unusual, but also in Europe, the far east, Japan and all sorts of territories. But it also expanded beyond its target demographic – people the same age as the central characters in the piece. It’s really nice when that happens and a film takes off, particularly if it’s got very small beginnings, and there are plenty of things that one can point to as to why that’s the case, but I don’t think there’s any one thing that made it happen. It’s just sometimes movies work and catch fire, and just settle down into an identity that connects with an audience, and sometimes they almost do but don’t quite. What were you looking forward to exploring in this one that you may not have had a chance to last time? Well I suppose landing a lot of ideas that were implicit in the last one because, if a film’s good in the sense that it’s sound, its underpinnings are sound and its narrative has some implications that you haven’t necessarily realised fully until you start putting it together, you have a chance to go back and really figure that out. The first film clearly had a large cast of characters to establish, and then it was primarily concerned with observing and witnessing the effects of this massive cultural collision that they all went through. That’s its primary purpose and we’re getting to know them but, in the second film you have a chance to ask what happened as a result of that, and it’s a very interesting premise. I suppose it’s “there’s no present like the time”, meaning that things don’t go on forever, and what life actually is and what its possibilities are have to be seized. The contradiction is that, as Judi Dench’s character says, “how many new lives can we have?” and the answer is “as many as we like, while we can.” But the answer, crucially, is not “as many as we like,” but “as many as we like, while we can.” And the “while we can” hovers over the film, because I think any decent comedy has to come out of an acceptance of a reality, and jokes are a way of saying things in an acceptable way that would become unacceptable if they were said straight. So Sonny’s summation at the beginning of the film – “why die here when I can die there?” – is actually a perfectly accurate summary of the film, and both funny and true. Do you think there could be a third film, with the implication that Sonny might buy the third hotel? We didn’t think about making a second one while we were making the first – nothing could have been further from anybody’s mind – and I would have to say that, similarly, there was no thought of making a third one while we were making the second. Partly for reasons I’ve just stated and partly because, while there’ll be a story to tell, whether it’s what an audience will want to see is another matter. That’s a hard thing to top, just narratively, not least because Indian weddings are so powerful and so infectious and so intoxicating. So if I were a writer, which I am partly, I would say whether you would turn left from there or right, and so no, we haven’t thought of that, and all I can say is that I felt very lucky to be presiding over a cast that came out intact at the other end of this one. Because people are fragile – Judi and Maggie are both in their eighties now – and I was asking them to do a lot of very tough things. How was it reassembling the cast? So we had to ask if they were open to it, and they were all open to it, and I made a pact with them saying, ‘well you need to wait and see what script we’re offering you, and you can defer your decision until then, but we want to know we’re not wasting our time.’ In fact, they all jumped in immediately at that point. That’s a reflection of the fact that they enjoyed making the first film a lot, which has a massive amount to do with India, which is a pretty life-changing experience anyway. Was it a different experience going back the second time? It felt while we were there like we’d just finished shooting the last scene of the first film; the sense of continuity was pretty overwhelming. The sense of reunion was very, very strong because we were coming back with a crew and a cast we had not seen in the meantime – the British cast and the Indian cast. This film has an enormous number of night scenes in – at least half the entire shoot was night shooting – and outside, which is very challenging for older people who feel the cold more. So there was that, and there were the routine difficulties of shooting in India, as getting control of anything at all is virtually impossible. There seems to be a lot less resistance to this film being about older actors, playing older characters, about being older – have you noticed that? That was a total surprise, and has to do with gaining a perspective on a stage of life into which all of those people will move themselves, but currently the experience is probably that of their parents, or aunts or people who are ahead of them on that curve. I think a lot of scales fell off a lot of people’s eyes about that. The movie lifts the lid on what goes on in the hearts and minds of older people. They’re behaving like teenagers most of the time, and that’s a secret that hadn’t quite been lifted to the surface, that perhaps the film did. So I think we have lessened the resistance, and also it’s a big part of the audience now. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
