Writer Hanif Kureishi on Le Week-End

Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi – both British and in their late fifties, but seemingly as different as could be – have maintained a close working relationship for the past two decades. Michell, a director whosefilms include Notting Hill and Changing Lanes, and Kureishi, the novelist who also wrote the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, stay constantly in touch, and every so often make a film that is unmistakably their own.

Their first collaboration was in 1993, when they adapted Kureishi’s first novel for television, The Buddha of Suburbia, a semi-autobiographical account of a teenager with a British mother and a Pakistani father, growing up in south London and yearning for a life in the theatre.