BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM — Gurinder Chadha shoots and scores

On the opening day of the World Cup, we take a look and a listen to the soccer-centric sleeper BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (2002). Director Gurinder Chadha tells Rico about making her breakthrough rom-com about girl power, British Asian identity, and football—and how its mashup soundtrack of pop hits and Bhangra bangers scored goals of its own. Other guests include superstar DJ/producer Bally Sagoo, and the film's music supervisor Liz Gallacher (THE FULL MONTY).

Our audio documentary podcast returns with a sequel to our popular 2023 season that dives deep into the grooves of classic movie “needle drops.”  Titled “Needle on the Record, Side Two,” in each episode host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a film that fused music and image to make magic—and sometimes, changed popular culture.

GREGORY'S GIRL is streaming on MUBI in the US & CA as a part of the The World’s Game: Football on Screen collection starting tomorrow. 

OFFSIDE is now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Latin America, Netherlands, Australia and Turkey. 

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode contains adult language, irresistible beats and spoilers. Gurinder Chadha was born to Indian parents in Kenya in 1960, but when she was two they moved to Southall, a part of London locals called Little India, where her folks tried to keep her in touch with her Indian roots, starting with her first trips to the cinema. My first experience must have been going to see Indian movies with my parents, because there were three cinemas that showed Indian movies, and my dad was a great lover of Indian movies, but they were three hours long, so I always remember going and sleeping through them. And when her folks took her to her first Hollywood flick in a posher part of town called Ealing, she also wasn't impressed. At first. It was showing <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, and I remember being super excited because we had to get the bus to go to Ealing and going in the cinema and the film starting. And it was black and white. And I remember being so upset that this film that was supposed to be so special that we'd come all the way to Ealing for was in black and white. And I threw a massive tantrum in the theater, kicking the seat in front of me because I was so disappointed. And then, of course, it goes into glorious Technicolor.<i>Toto...</i><i>I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.</i> And then I felt like a right lemon after that. But I remember that very clearly. It sounds like an early memory for you is- that movies can surprise you.- Yes. Or I'm spoiled. One of the two. A few decades later, Gurinder surprised a lot of people herself by making a mega hit movie that was just like Southall, a collision of East and West. A lot of it set to a Punjabi beat that helped turn dance floors technicolor. I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the global film company that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This week we are continuing Season 11, which we're calling

Needle On The Record: 2:27

Side Two. By popular demand, this is the sequel to our season a while back all about needle drops. Those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie and magic happens. A few weeks ago, we dropped our first episode of the season about the classic anime<i>Whisper of the Heart</i> and its fixation on the Americana anthem<b>Take Me Home, Country Roads.</b> But I realized as we put these next episodes together, that we kind of accidentally on purpose are looking at movies full of needle drops from the UK circa the '80s and ''90s. Hmm, weird. Only a time and place some of my favorite music ever, comes from. Because for one thing, there was all this cultural crossbreeding that made for crazy, unexpected music hybrids and subcultures. The skinhead movement was born out of a love for reggae, and I couldn't believe that there was such a thing as a black skinhead. I'd never, ever, ever heard of it. And it was also a time when England was going through such huge social and political change that even the poppiest glammest bands or songs had something to say. It's operatic and it's slightly ridiculous, but also it was about the power of love in the face of AIDS. That's why they wrote it. So it's no surprise filmmakers into the 21st century have been using this music to say something themselves. And Gurinder Chadha's sleeper 2002 hit <i>Bend It Like Beckham</i> is a great example. On the surface, it's a relentlessly optimistic comedy that is actually about the relentlessly tough task of fitting into two cultures at once. People referred to you as suffering Who said, "Oh, you're having an identity crisis"because you don't know which culture you are." With a soundtrack full of feel good party music, that's also the sound of British Asians finding their identity. Yeah, my mom and dad were constantly drumming this Indian sound into my head, whereas I was more <i>Top of the Pops,</i> man. That is superstar DJ and producer Bally Sagoo, one of the remix wizards of bhangra music, a phenomenon that exploded in the ''90s and is all over this movie. And I talked with him, the film's music supervisor, Liz Gallacher, and Gurinder herself, to learn how this little indie rom com sports flick and its soundtrack scored some big, big goals. So just in time for the World Cup kick off this week, take a knee as we drop the needle on <i>Bend It Like Beckham.</i> So first off, quick note to my fellow Americans. For the rest of this episode, I'm going to defer to my British guests and also to most of the world by referring to what we call soccer, as football. And back in the late ''90s, if you were going to pick one Brit to make one of the best known football movies ever, it probably wouldn't have been Gurinder Chadha.<i>Bend It</i> is written by three people, which is myself, my husband Paul, and my friend Guljit and Guljit is a big football fan. And that's where all the stats and sports trivia- in the movie came from.- Yes. Yeah. Guljit and my husband, Paul. He's a big Lakers fan. He's more basketball. But any sport he's into, they were the football people. For me, it was the political precinct. Let me put an Indian girl in the middle of this world where she's not supposed to belong, you know, and see what happens. Because, yeah, back then British football was an especially unwelcoming world. Growing up, football was a kind of no-go territorial white male domain. Often at football matches you have terrible fights and there's a lot of violence. Different sides are always beating each other up, you know. There was this term football hooligan here.<i>German fans cheering their team</i><i>is the only provocation the English need.</i> And some football teams were incredibly racist. We had the right wing party, the National Front, in the '70s, their emblem was the Union Jack. And so sometimes people would be carrying those flags at football matches and for me, that always signified that's the right wing. You know, that's a right wing supporter. Until sometime in the late ''90s, she remembers seeing black football hero Ian Wright score a goal, then race onto the field shouldering his own Union Jack. And my head exploded and I was like, wow, that is an incredible image. And that's when I started thinking about this.<i>And David Beckham gets the ball yet again for Manchester United.</i><i>He's really taking responsibility every time they have possession.</i><i>Bend It Like Beckham</i> starts appropriately enough, with a televised football match. There's the actual football star David Beckham killing it for his team, Manchester United, until suddenly he gets the ball and passes it to a female Indian teammate.<i>It's a decent cross and there is Bhamra.</i><i>That's a fine header. And she's scored!</i><i>Oh, it's a goal by Jess Bhamra!</i> An unbelievable moment because, yeah, of course it's only our hero Jesminder Bhamra's daydream, which she is jolted out of when she imagines her own mother appearing during the post-game analysis.<i>Mrs Bhamra, you must be very proud of your daughter.</i><i>Not at all.</i><i>She shouldn't be running around with all these men showing</i><i>her bare legs to 70,000 people.</i> It's the clever kick off. Yeah, I said it to a movie about a southhall girl with her feet in two cultures, neither of which want her to do the one thing she loves, play football. Jess's mom thinks it's scandalous and will keep her from finding a good Punjabi husband, while her jaded dad knows it's crazy hard to be a brown person in a white Britain's game.<i>None of our boys are in any of the football leagues.</i><i>You think they will let our girls.</i><i>She will only end up disappointed like me.</i> But in this story, there is a local girls team that wants her, no matter what her folks think, led by spunky Keira Knightley in one of her first starring roles.<i>My mum doesn't want me to play anymore.</i><i>That's Bollocks!</i><i>My mum's never wanted me to play.</i><i>You just can't take no for an answer.</i> And the team's coach, a dashing Irishman named Joe, wants Jess too. Alas, she knows her folks will explode if she dates outside her community.<i>White, no. Black, definitely not. A Muslim...</i> And yet, by the end, multiple spoiler alert, she does get to date who she wants. She does get to kick ass in football. She does win the big game, and she does get to fly off with her best buddy Keira to a football scholarship in the USA.<i>Santa Clara is in California. It's like one of the top teams.</i><i>Oh, it's so amazing. Me and Jess there together.</i> In other words, for a tale that tackles racism, sexism, social conservatism, all the isms, Gurinder Chadha and her co-writers still knocked out the happiest screenplay ever. A vision of a potentially more accepting, multicultural UK. She got a glimpse of when Ian Wright flew his flag. I think that's just my worldview. That's how I get through life and that's how I see the world. And I wanted this girl to get it all, have it all, everything she wanted. I wanted her to have it all. And when she imagined a soundtrack, she knew it was going to spotlight a kind of music that actually got her into films in the first place. A style that also, against all odds, had it all. Wow. Where do I start? My name is Bally Sagoo from the UK. Music producer, DJ. I want to tell you the story of one of the guys who defined that style and made Gurinder fall in love with it. Bally Sagoo who is seriously one of the coolest, most positive and excited people I have ever interviewed. Especially when he talks about playing music. I get more fun when I see non-Indians, non-Asians dancing up and down on my music. Of course Spanish, Latino, you know, English, Americans, Jamaicans, all these people, they have no idea what the language is. But you don't need to do because there's no language.'Cause music never has a language, man. There's something that everyone relates to. Bally actually had to learn early how to speak that universal language. As the child of immigrant parents in a lonely part of the industrial city of Birmingham. It was a mainly white area. We had no foreigners there at all, so we had a lot of racism. We had a lot of problems growing up. I used to get my turban knocked off. I used to have a lot of issues growing up in the UK. He took refuge with other kids of color and their music. I had Black friends. I was more into the Black music scene. More of my friends were Black. I had hardly any, like Indian friends. And then I got heavily into the reggae and Bob Marley and I would save my week's dinner money and buy Bob Marley's new record and blah, blah, blah. And I built up a massive music, which I still have. I have, I don't know, 20, 30,000 records more than that. But the music he definitely wasn't collecting back then was the stuff his parents listened to... called bhangra. Bhangra is a Punjabi style of music and a dance, and it originates from Punjab, north of Punjab. I basically was listening to it at my mom and dad's house growing up. It was more traditional, consisting of a dhol, a big heavy drum that they use. And there's a little string instrument called the Tumbi, which is a one string instrument. Those are the two key elements in any bhangra song, really. So yeah, my mom and dad were constantly drumming this Indian sound into my head, whereas I was more <i>Top of the Pops</i>, man. I was more disco and soul, Motown... That was all I ever listened to. Not a single Indian tune. Not a single Indian influence. I didn't have no influences from India. I didn't like anything remotely to do with my culture, my country. Well, India. Because I was growing up in the UK. Instead, he spent a lot of time obsessing over like the sparkling disco production on the<i>Saturday Night Fever</i> soundtrack, or the heavy reverb on those reggae records. Until in his teens... he got a couple of cassette decks and started making his own remixes of whatever was on the radio. Every week, top of the pops top 40 would come on. I would record the songs, chop them up on my cassette players, bounce one to another to another, full of hiss and full of noise. And the Dolby would never help. Dolby noise reduction couldn't do nothing because I'd made so many copies of a song. So then I started doing these, like, little mixes in my room, and then it kind of exploded from there. Yeah. Bally became a local teen music mogul. He gave his attic studio a name, Curry Wood, and started hustling his tapes to other kids. Yeah, I was on the streets outside my college in the rain, selling like a drug dealer. I was selling my music tapes out of my rucksack, doing ten, 12, 15 pounds a week, sometimes selling these mixtapes, and people come along and say, mix me Bob Marley with Boney M and mix me Bee Gees and mix me, blah blah blah. And right around then, something new got thrown in the mix that was gonna end up making him way more than 15 pounds a week. I think it happened when my little sister came into my room one night and she said, stop playing around with those records. Try mixing this. She gave him a cassette of homegrown Bhangra acts, UK based bands who'd started off doing gigs in working class Indian pubs in Southall and now were growing their own national circuit, playing anywhere British Asians partied. Yes, well, I'd go to a wedding or a birthday party with my mum and dad, I'd see them on stage like the three giants, Alaap, Heera, Premi, dressed like, you know... Yeah, they were proper<i>Saturday Night Fever.</i> They all had the<i>Saturday Night Fever</i> clothes on. Big white shirts and flarey trousers and hairy chests- just piling up the bloody...- Medallions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know the scene. Anyway, so my sister brought a cassette to my room and she said,"See if you can play around with this." Maybe because he could literally see the funky disco connection. He took her advice. Like I would be doing, you know, I'd take a western drum loop or a James Brown drum beat or something, and I see what it would sound like... and then I'd take that Indian beat and put it on there, and it would go out of sync in places, but the vibe was there. And then my sister like,"You should do something like that and release it." And then I thought... Maybe. Flash forward to 1990 and all the British Asian cool kids knew Bally Sagoo for tracks like this:<i>Hey! Jamalo</i> where he took a groovy but more traditional sounding tune from UK bhangra star Malkit Singh, added synth, that James Brown beat and a little turntablism... and sent it into dance club overdrive. He wasn't alone. Acts like Apache Indian and B21 were also fusing bhangra with reggae or pop. This stuff was blasting out of car cassette decks in Birmingham at packed bhangra based club nights in Southall, and then a new audience started getting into it. Indian music was crossing over into the mainstream in the UK. That is Liz Gallacher. She has been music supervisor on hit UK movies since the ''90s, like<i>The Full Monty</i> and <i>Notting Hill.</i> It was very positive, uplifting. Artists started appearing and I think as well, British audiences that didn't know this kind of music were kind of drawn to the beat, the fun. Bally Sagoo. Punjabi MC had a massive hit. There was real energy in the music and it crossed over. You know, there were great hooks, great melodies. It was easy to listen to. It's not challenging. Still, back then, this was revolutionary. British Asian culture getting embraced as the coolest thing going? Crazy. And when Gurinder Chadha heard Bally Sagoo's feel good music, to her, it sounded revolutionary. At last, a celebration of cultural fusion. Because until that point, you know, you have this idea where people refer to you, second generation Asians in Britain, as maybe suffering. People who said,"Oh, you're having an identity crisis because you don't know"which culture you are." And it comes from people who are monocultural because they don't understand what it's like to easily slip into different languages and different cultural frameworks. So it was when the bhangra explosion happened in Britain, the British Asian bhangra music scene, I wanted to document that. I was a journalist at this point with the BBC, but I felt I wanted to document the music. Gurinder's very first film is a 1990 BBC documentary called<i>I'm British But...</i><i>Shut up!</i><i>Right, boys.</i> And right from the opening theme music, a bhangra take on <i>Rule Britannia.</i> She connects that multi-culti bhangra sound with its fans' multi-culti identities.<i>I see myself as a British... Maybe, well, Welsh, I suppose...</i><i>I would prefer to be described as a Scottish Pakistani</i><i>rather than British.</i> I had five characters, four were four young Asians, and I asked them all how they identified themselves. And then the music was the fifth character which added a whole new layer, and that idea that you could fuse music to represent yourself as these combinations.<i>Mixing together Bengali music, folk music and West music,</i><i>and making people appreciate and actually forcing them</i><i>to dance to our music.</i> That fusion kind of helped a whole generation crystallize their identities. And so that music in my films to this day is representative of that. When Gurinder moved on to features, she kept casting bhangra as the fifth character, like in <i>Bhaji on the Beach,</i> about British Asians on a seaside holiday. That soundtrack's full of bhangra reggae remixes, and for <i>Bend It Like Beckham,</i> she figured she'd kind of do a remix of her own, pairing bhangra tracks with... everything. Because this girl Jess Bhamra could be everything and so could I and so could the soundtrack. There's no rules to that soundtrack of that film. No rules. Alas, the folks who finance movies have lots of rules. How Gurinder Chadha got<i>Bend It Like Beckham</i> into scoring position anyway. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. Alright, everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers. We've always got something new to discover. And hey, like I said at the top, today's episode is posting on the same day that the 2026 World Cup kicks off. So how about discovering some football movies? Or again, soccer movies if you're one of my American homies. Streaming on MUBI in the US and Canada starting Friday, June 12th, we have put together a program of films we are calling, The World's Game: Football on Screen. And one of the movies in there I want to tell you about is Scottish director, Bill Forsyth's just delightful movie,<i>Gregory's Girl</i>, which was a sleeper hit when it came out back in 1980. It's about the lovably awkward teen Gregory, who plays for his school football team. They kind of suck, so they recruit a great new player, a girl who, of course, Gregory immediately falls for, and soon, one of the most offbeat and unpredictable dates ever ensues. This would actually be kind of a great double bill with <i>Bend It Like Beckham.</i> Again, <i>Gregory's Girl</i> is streaming on MUBI starting Friday, June 12th in the US and Canada as part of our film group called, The World's Game: Football on Screen. And I also want to call out another movie we've got in some other countries that would be the Iranian comedy<i>Offside,</i> and that's from director Jafar Panahi. He made a huge impact last year with his Oscar nominated<i>It Was Just an Accident.</i><i>Offside</i> is about a group of Iranian women who try to sneak into a 2006 World Cup qualifying match because women aren't allowed into football stadiums in Iran. Portions of this thing were filmed during the actual match between Iran and Bahrain, and Panahi had two different endings ready, depending on who won. It's just a great, cool movie that is streaming on MUBI now in the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Latin America. Go subscribe and check it out at mubi.com And I'm aware that was a lot of movies and countries I just ran by you, but don't worry, as usual, we have all the links and info you need about all of this in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode. So, it's the late ''90s, Gurinder Chadha is shopping around the script to <i>Bend It Like Beckham</i> looking for funding and sunny and accessible as it was, you can imagine a few issues that might have made an investor nervous back then. The movie deals with touchy issues of race, there weren't stars attached, but weirdly, the only part readers really seem to have a problem with... was the football part. There were women's teams, but women's football was seen as a very second rate, slightly apologetic sport, you know. Yeah, in the '90s, a decade when the US women's team won the World Cup twice, UK women's football was only just building steam. There was no money. Some top players worked part time jobs so they could afford to pay their own bus fare to big games. And media coverage was more or less zero. So trying to get the film financed was particularly tough because everyone thought it was a joke. The idea of women playing football, and the fact that I wanted to make a film about women playing football, people honestly laughed at me and said, "This is so funny."What? Are you serious? No way." In fact, when she submitted the script for public funding at the UK Film Council... A producer had told me that a reader had read my script and that it wasn't going to get commissioned. And I was like, "Why?" And they said,"Because they'll never find an"Indian girl who can bend a ball like David Beckham." And I was so frustrated that I went down there and shouted at everybody. I said, "It's fucking racist. How dare you?"Do they think Harrison Ford jumps out of helicopters?" The good news? The council's then new honcho, John Woodward, took her script past the readers, straight to the folks who could give a green light. And he walked down to the committee and he said,"I've read this."I don't care what you do, but you're going to pass this script"at this meeting today." And that's exactly what happened. And I got 957,000 pounds. That money attracted others to kick in money, but it was Gurinder's script that attracted her music supervisor, especially the football part. It kind of resonated with me. It was kind of weird because my family are Irish. Once again, Liz Gallagher. There's kind of similarities with Indian and Irish culture. My mum was very... I wanted to play football when I was young. I was really into football and it was like,"No, you can't play football."Girls don't play football." It's very different now. They didn't want me to be seen as playing football or doing boys things. So just like the movie's hero for Liz, football equaled liberation. And musically she associated that with the UK nightclub scene at the time. One club in particular. You know, Ministry of Sound was huge. Oh my gosh, it was a real groundbreaking-- It was like kind of this massive, massive club. And they even set up a label because they were just like, you know, so groundbreaking musically. They'd have the best DJ's, the best nights. It was-- What was-- Describe what that space was like. Gosh, I can't, I mean, it's a bit unfair to ask me that because I was probably a little intoxicated most of the time but... But I was there! But she did remember the music they spun there, electronic acts like Basement Jaxx with a sense of playful euphoria. Meanwhile, Gurinder tossed in her own favorite classic and modern pop tracks with the same vibe from Blondie to the Scottish band Texas. Every track was on my iPod. They're all tracks from my iPod at the time, and I thought,"Oh, I like this track, let me put this in."Oh, I like this, let me put this in." And <i>Bend It Like Beckham,</i> almost any time Jess kicks a ball around, that's the kind of freewheeling mix of music you hear. But not bhangra, by design.

I always thought of it as: 25:25

the freedom and Jess expressing herself, we used the pop contemporary music, and then often the Indian music was around her family and tradition. Yeah, I think of UK bhangra as the super expressive party music but for a lot of the movie, you hear it when Jess is being held back by family and tradition, like in one of Gurinder's favorite scenes in the film, when Jess is crushed to learn she's got to miss the big game.<i>Your sister needs you.</i> To attend her sister's wedding. Cut to her in the backyard, bereft. And when she's crying, there's a Punjabi song that comes on called <i>Jind Mahi.</i> Which I didn't subtitle at all. I just left it as a treat for us Punjabis who understand. And the song says,"Strive hard, do what you want."Don't forget who you are. Don't forget your land."Don't forget your culture and don't forget who you are." It's the sound of a character who wants to cut loose from her culture while also loving the hell out of it. But then, I love this, just a few minutes later in the movie's final act, Chadha finally uses bhangra as the bridge between cultures.<i>Look at how happy they are, Tony, I don't want to ruin it for him.</i><i>- What are you going to ruin?- Nothing. It's okay.</i> That's right after the aforementioned wedding, when Jess's father realizes the error of his ways and gives her his blessing to leave the reception and get in the game.<i>If this is the only way</i><i>I'm going to see you smiling on your sister's wedding day,</i><i>then go now.</i> Suddenly, there's a montage. While her entire family danced deliriously to the band B21 and a tune called <i>Darshan,</i> the bhangra music carries over into a football match for the first time.<i>What's happening?</i><i>Start warming up, we're one-nil down.</i> And then Chadha cuts back and forth between the two spaces, the reception and the game, which of course, Jess wins. And then she comes back to her family and happily joins the dance. Finally, in the story and on the soundtrack, Jess Bhamra has it all. So in a minute I'm gonna tell you how this movie was received. But to get there, first I want to mention a visual and musical metaphor Chadha uses all the time in <i>Bend It Like Beckham,</i> aiming for the sky. Southall, you see, is near Heathrow Airport. So she throws in all these shots of jets soaring right over Jess's neighborhood, like her sky high dreams, just out of reach. Appropriately enough, the first song you hear in the movie is a track called<i>Elevation,</i> and the last song, as Jess gets ready to finally board a plane herself to go chase her dreams, has an airborne title, too, that also happens to be Gurinder's favorite tune in the movie. The real moment for me is Curtis Mayfield, <i>Move On Up.</i><i>Just move on up</i><i>To a greater day</i> Because the idea of taking a song written by an African American about the civil rights movement and standing up for yourself, taking that song and making it my song in my movie. That actually gave me chills. And for Liz Gallacher, it was just the obvious choice to end with. I think it's just got great momentum. It's a classic. Everyone knows it. It's a toe tapper.

It's very: 29:03

where Jess is going in her life. Yeah. I mean, what I kind of love about it is that it is so, like, exactly on the nose. She's literally taking off in a plane and this music is <i>Move On Up.</i> Yeah, yeah, probably a bit on the nose, but you know, it's a great ending. It's such a great track. I don't mind that it's a bit on the nose. I'm cool with that. So all this was more than a little ironic when right in the middle of post-production, with everyone's hopes soaring, three planes laid everything low. All the original score that you hear is Bally Sagoo. And when I was making the soundtrack, actually, I was with Bally Sagoo in his studio in Birmingham, and his wife called and said, "Put the telly on."Put the TV on, quick!" So we put the TV on and we saw the second plane go into the towers on 9/11. We were working on the one of the scenes and we had to stop. Me and Gurinder were standing there in my studio, we paused and this 9/11 thing was going on and this plane crashing. And I was like,"Is this some movie or something?" And it was like, real. We just dropped everything and we kind of just sat there and we thought, this is just really sad. We were like, oh my God, what's just happened? But the movie had been made at that point. It was finished. I'd made a movie that was a pre 9/11 movie. One that even ends with Jess's family seeing her off at her departure gate. Post 9/11, they wouldn't even be allowed through airport security without a ticket. So there was that, the fact that the movie was about a woman's sport Chadha's own country didn't pay much attention to, the fact it had no stars... When the movie finally debuted April 2002, Gurinder had her hopes pretty grounded. Oh, I expected, my cousins to like it. I expected people like me to like it. I thought some cool people in New York might like it... but I did not expect it to have the impact that it had.<i>Bend It Like Beckham</i> opened at number one at the UK box office and stayed there for weeks. It was the biggest non-hollywood hit of the year, and when it opened overseas it got bigger, earning the modern equivalent of 170 million bucks. Well, I didn't know it was going to be so big, otherwise I would have asked Gurinder for more money. What the hell, man? I thought it was going to be a small movie. Well, I mean, what was your first inkling that this thing was blowing up. When I was seeing it everywhere, left, right and center, man. I was traveling around the world and I was seeing it being played and my non-Asian mates were all getting into it. That's when you know you've crossed over because now it's not just Asians or, you know, your local people that are into it. People had been reeling from 9/11, globally. And so when this cheerful cultural movie came out, it was something for people, I think, to hold on to. They needed something, you know, to balance out the terror. And I think that's another reason it became so popular at the time. Of course, having the name of the world's most famous football player in the title might have driven some interest. But the movie was also huge in the USA, where it earned five times its entire budget, despite the title, which by the way, Gurinder's US distributor hated. Searchlight bought it. I went to the States to do publicity. No one knew who David Beckham was. I did interviews, very clearly remember this, with the <i>Washington Post</i> and the man was saying to me,"Who is Beckman?""What, who, why?""Beckman". And Searchlight wanted to change the title because they said,"No one knows who David Beckham is,"you can't release a movie with that in the title."You gotta call it 'Soccer and Me' or something like that." You know? And by this point it had been a big hit in England. And so we kept it as <i>Bend It...</i> And of course, the film did so well in the States that David Beckham became a household name in the States. So we did, in the end, you know, he helped us and we helped him.<i>And this would be to win it for England.</i> The movie also gave a boost to another rising star, UK women's football.<i>England are champions again!</i> That's the sound of England's national team, the Lionesses winning the women's Euro title in 2025 for the second time. These days, women's clubs like Arsenal pack 60,000 seat stadiums, and their star players definitely don't have to pay their own bus fare to games. A lot of them trace their inspiration to play back to <i>Bend It Like Beckham.</i> In the 2010s, some decided to start their careers at US colleges'cause that's what Jess does in the movie. Brighton player Caitlin Hayes told sports website<i>The Athletic,</i> that before every game, she blasts, <i>Move On Up.</i> Which goes to show the MVP of the movie even now, is its soundtrack. I felt like it was a kind of special film. I didn't realize that it would cross over so much, and honestly, I didn't realize that people would talk about the music so much. I used to get emails all the time, mainly from young American girls who were really into football or soccer as it is over here, loving the music. Where can I get the soundtrack? What was this track? I loved that track. It was, I was just blown away, you know, it seemed to really resonate with people. Well, Gurinder Chadha thinks she knows why. What it did was having Texas and Basement Jaxx and Blondie, I had <i>Atomic</i> in there, Blondie, you know, all these sort of pop songs as it were, mixed with bhangra music. It just all, it just represented all different sides of myself around the world. It spoke about all the different sides of us, really. I mean, it just somehow just I think it captures the exuberance of the movie. This leads nicely to my last question. I know we're about to run out of time here. The cheerfulness, both of the soundtrack and the movie itself, I know you're doing a sequel... In the current global and particularly UK environment right now, it seems like it would be much harder to make a movie about identity as just relentlessly cheerful as this movie is. Will it be this relentlessly cheerful? And how do you do-- How can you do that? And maybe why would you do that? Well, I think that's why it still is seen and talked about constantly because it's a good counteract to, you know, some of the terrible things going on around us, particularly right now. Do you imagine the sequel having like a similar hail effect on people in the midst of what's like a pretty dismal time, globally, in a lot of ways? Well, I think the reason why I haven't done a sequel or even thought about going beyond that was because I knew it was-- It's a very tough act to follow, you know? The only reason I'm considering it now is because of the way the game has changed and the world has changed, and I feel like now is the time to bring that much loved world back and do some more good, I hope. Yeah, maybe in a polarized world where everything's framed in black and white, exactly what's needed is a sudden pop of color. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us for more stories about great movies with great music. Next week, writer/director Andrew Haigh looks back on his gorgeous 2023 tearjerker,<i>All of Us Strangers,</i> and the UK pop hits that kept him sane in the '80s. Like now as an adult, when I go back to those songs, it drags me back to the feeling that I felt at that time. So I really used music as a way to time travel, I suppose. If you dig the Pet Shop Boys, The Housemartins, Fine Young Cannibals, you want to follow us so you don't miss that one and have your hankies at the ready. Till then, if you love the show, seriously, hit pause and leave a five star review right now, wherever you listen, won't you? Let the world know we're not your standard movie chat show. You can also find me on Threads or Instagram at Rico Gagliano that is Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O. I'm currently taking suggestions for your favorite bhangra tracks because I'm now obsessed. And now let's roll credits. This episode was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer, Kat Kowalczyk. Jackson Musker is our tireless booking producer. Mastering by Stephen Colon. Martin Austwick composed our original music. This episode you also heard the tracks <i>Blueprint</i> by Jahzzar and <i>Special Vibe</i> by Yarin Primak. Those are both courtesy of Tribe of Noise, plus the bhangra song<i>Poor Artist</i> by Ribhav Argrawal. Special thanks this week to Louis Nash for taping Gurinder and to Peter, Therese and Karina Lesser. This show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca. And as always, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening. Go watch the movies. And this Sunday I am rooting for the Netherlands vs Japan. Go Oranje.