Call that a melting pot?America is still congratulating itself on its multicultural movie industry. But Britain is miles ahead 

Gurinder ChadhaThursday 11 April 2002The Guardian 

In 1994 my first film, Bhaji on the Beach, was released on five prints, on the basis that it was a small, sweet film with no box-office expectations. It sold out for weeks and by public demand went from art houses to multiplexes. But there was still little recognition by the industry of its wider potential.

Eight years on my new film, Bend It Like Beckham, is being released on more than 450 prints this week. I haven't changed, and my sensibilities and reasons for making films haven't changed, but the British audience's appetite for films about Britain has.

The reviews of Bend It Like Beckham thus far have been touching and intelligent: people don't see the film in terms of race and culture clash, but as a story about people in suburban Britain, about what it's like to be young, to have parents who don't understand your dreams, to be suffocating in a suburb with your whole life ahead of you. These are all references to the film's universal appeal, not its "Asian-specific" ways. For me, this has been exhilarating. British audiences identify with characters regardless of their background. Multiculturalism isn't the battleground that it is in the US.

While British audiences want to see films that genuinely reflect their experiences, in the US it's a different story. It may be the most multicultural nation in the world, but it's still deeply segregated, and that is reflected in how films are financed, marketed and consumed. The roles that won Oscars for Denzel Washington and Halle Berry were hardly ground-breaking. Training Day is a typical white cop/ black cop genre film, while Monster's Ball is an interracial love story. It has had a limited release on the art-film circuit for predominantly white liberal audiences. Clearly, the taste of the Academy doesn't reflect the tastes of middle America.

The problem with getting films made in the US is the pernicious view that white people don't want to see films in which people of colour tell their own stories. Studios make black films specifically for black audiences, on budgets that they know they can recoup. Every green-lighted film is determined by niche marketing for a particular community.

When I made What's Cooking? in the US two years ago, I had first-hand knowledge of how divided these lines are. I wanted to make a film about contemporary American families who happened to be black, Latino, Jewish and Vietnamese. I thought I'd made a truly American film that had the potential to reach mainstream audiences. After it opened the Sundance film festival, several US distributors said they loved the film, but that I had given them the problem of having to market it separately to the four different communities in the film, and therefore they'd have to spend four times as much on the release. They couldn't fathom the idea that they could release the film in the same way that they would a family film featuring a white family.

That's where things are different in the UK. Whatever one thinks of the film, the box-office success of East Is East was an eye-opener. No one would have imagined that a film about mixed-race Pakistanis in Salford would be such a hit. It was marketed as a northern comedy, and people flocked to see it. They recognised the characters in the film and the England that it presented as their own.

The US has been presented as a paradise for black actors, whereas the UK is seen as being far behind. My feelings are the opposite. I believe that there are greater opportunities to create innovative, widely appealing black and Asian films inthe UK than there are in the US.

The challenge for black British film-makers is the same challenge facing the British film industry. It's often said that we don't have a Denzel Washington, but neither do we have a Brad Pitt or a Julia Roberts. We don't have any stars that can "sell" films, full stop. What we are recognised for is our brilliant actors, directors, writers and technicians. Virtually none of our hits in recent years has featured stars - The Full Monty, East Is East, Billy Elliot. British audiences responded to their stories because they recognised themselves on the screen. The real problem for British films is that they are now being financed with a view to how they will work in the US.

Raising the finance for Bend It Like Beckham was difficult even after the success of East Is East, partly because our leading actress is British Asian, and therefore not a star. Every UK financier passed on the project until British Screen and the Film Council came forward and supported me. European funding followed and now the film has sold all over Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. So far the few Americans who have seen the film seem to love it, but they are busy "figuring out" how to market it in the US.

Which brings me back to the myth of the US being the land of opportunity. After my experience of making What's Cooking? in LA, I wanted to come back to the UK and make a widely appealing, commercial comedy with a British Asian family at the centre of the frame. Five years ago I didn't think that was possible; today I know it is.

In the 1960s my father came to London and was refused a job at Barclays Bank because he wore a turban, even though he worked for Barclays in Kenya. He was denied a pint in certain pubs in Southall. I lost him recently and my film is a tribute to him. He would be amazed to see posters for Bend It Like Beckham on buses on Oxford Street, on the tube and on the TV - posters that show an Asian girl who wants to play footie instead of cooking aloo gobi. He would be thrilled to see it opening in Leicester Square, and even more thrilled that audiences across the UK are identifying with an Asian family as one of their own.

· Bend It Like Beckham is released tomorrow.