INSIDE OUT

IF YOU HAD turned up a little early to the world premiere of Blinded By The Light at Sundance Festival in Utah, and made your way towards the auditorium through the nearby car park, you might have seen something surprising: the director, Gurinder Chadha, dancing with the film’s star, Viveik Kalra, and co-writers Paul Mayeda Berges and Sarfraz Manzoor, to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’, as it blasted through a car stereo.

“Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack…”

For Chadha, it was certainly one way to triumph over the nerves that naturally come when you watch your film with an audience for the first time. And by the time the film — based on Manzoor’s book, , about coming of age in 1980s Luton with a little help from Springsteen — had finished, the crowd were on their feet and a bidding war was erupting among American distributors. What happened later that evening is what Chadha, in a studio in London’s Kentish Town on a rainy June day, calls “the sort of thing that independent filmmakers dream of”, with a smile. She was on her feet once more, on the dancefloor at the afterparty, when she received a phone call to say that New Line were offering $15 million for the film. They’d actually only made it an hour into the film before