Hannah Rothschild: How did you come to be involved in My Beautiful Laundrette?

Stephen Frears: It came in a slightly dodgy way. There was this boy who put a script through my door. I read it and said, ‘This is wonderful and we should do this now.’ I’d recently worked with Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe at Working Title on a pop video. So I said to Tim, ‘You had better produce this.’ He arranged a cash flow and then I rang up Channel 4 and said, ‘I want an answer in 24 hours.’ At 5 o’clock David Rose rang me on the Tuesday and said OK. So it worked.

You make it sound very easy.

Now it does. I am not even sure I dare to tell you this but actually it was only afterwards I discovered that they’d actually approached another director first but Hanif Kureishi insisted on me.

How many years later did you find that out?

Ten to fifteen. Just think, somewhere there’s a man who had his hands on it but it was snatched away.

How did you spot Daniel Day-Lewis? It was his first film.

I didn’t spot him! The women around me did. They told me to cast him because they fancied him.

Is that how you normally do your casting?

Of course. It works.