Rosie Boycott: How did you come to write My Beautiful Laundrette?

Hanif Kureishi: When Channel 4 started FilmFour in l982, David Rose was running the department and they didn’t have any films. It was a clean slate and you could do whatever you wanted. I was a Paki, the only Asian writer, so I got the ethnic work.

I felt grateful for a job. I had been working at the Royal Court for Max Stafford-Clark, but had not made much money. I was hanging around with a friend of my family whom I called ‘Uncle’. He ran laundrettes around Westbourne Grove and he said to me, ‘Why don’t you run one of these fucking laundrettes with me?’ Which I decided not to do: instead I decided to write a film about someone running a laundrette.

I had grown up in the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, at the time of the National Front marches. Many of my mates at schools were skinheads and they would come round to our house wearing the gear. My Beautiful Laundrette was my childhood; my youth went into that picture. There was the black movement, feminism and the gay stuff, but there hadn’t been any gay stuff on television, no one had ever shown it as explicitly as we did in Laundrette.

I went round to see Stephen [Frears] and he said he liked the script and wanted to make it, but for television, not the cinema. He didn’t want all the bother of making a film for the cinema and no one going to see it. Channel 4 agreed to do it.

What was the reaction?

We showed it at the Edinburgh Festival and it became a hit.

The gay community seemed rather grateful that we had made a film in which people were just gays without going on about it. The so-called Asians were annoyed about it, because they were never represented in the cinema and when they were represented they were shown as gays or drug dealers or bad landlords or whatever. So an argument began about whether writers like me represented the community or spoke for the community. There were demonstrations in New York against the film; they would march up and down threatening to bomb the cinema, so it got a bit tricky.

I decided that I wasn’t the person who would speak for the community. I just spoke for myself and that was more valuable.