What's Love Got to Do With It

I'm not unfamiliar with making romantic comedies, because I started out making films in Bollywood. They've always had a lot of drama and a lot of comedy. A lot ...

Because of the emotion needed we would stick to the script for a lot of scenes, but then I would ask Jemima if she’s OK with what we have got and if improv is then something we can explore. And Jemima and I would let the actors discover the characters too, and we had to give them the space. As you said that with making the Elizabeth films, did you find yourself being offered the same types of stories and it was then a conscious effort on your part to find stories that didn’t correlate with each other? I allow the actors a lot of improv, but when you’re doing a film of this kind, it’s very tightly written. I said to Lily that the way I envisioned her character (Zoe) is that she is inside a tumble dryer. I was up in the mountains in the Himalayas and she was in London, and we would speak (that way) and got to know each other quite a lot. And if I feel I can discover myself in that film, then I know I will do it, and I felt that with What’s Love Got To Do With It? I want to know that it came to me because I can create worlds. For me, every film is a way to discover something within myself that I didn’t know. A lot of romance and a lot of action. Even in Elizabeth there was the Duke of Anjou, if you remember that film and that character, and he was a completely comic character. They’ve always had a lot of drama and a lot of comedy.