‘Beautiful’s’ Writer Draws on the Details of Life for Inspiration

Over the past 15 years, writer Hanif Kureishi has been well loved by fans and critics in his own three-ring circus: movies, books and theater.

On the screen, he’s given us “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” and “The Buddha of Suburbia.” On the page, “The Black Album,” “Love in a Blue Time” and, just last month, the novel “Intimacy.” His short stories have appeared in Granta and the New Yorker. His plays, from “Soaking the Heat” to “The Mother Country” (an adaptation of “Mother Courage”) and this year, “Sleep With Me,” have been performed all over the world.

So how does he manage this remarkable feat of mixed media? “Well, I suppose, really, the page is a sort of stage, in a way,” Kureishi says by phone from London.

This is not at all the way his characters speak. Certainly not in Kureishi’s new film, “My Son the Fanatic,” where characters burst in on their own interior lives like intruders opening a door too suddenly. They almost never stammer politely.

“My Son the Fanatic,” a five-page story by Kureishi that ran years ago in the New Yorker, opens today in movie form, starring Om Puri and Rachel Griffiths. In this solemn jewel, Kureishi flips the generations--a liberal father watches with horror as his beloved son discovers Islam and dives over the fundamentalist edge.

At first Parvez, the father (Puri), thinks his son has gotten into drugs. He confides in his friend Bettina, a hooker (Griffiths) who rides in the taxi he drives for a living. The son’s disapproval of his father’s increasingly romantic relationship with Bettina and the father’s disapproval of his son’s fundamentalism barrel toward each other.

“Parvez was a kind of Virgil character for me,” Kureishi says. “His connection to the world was through capitalism, not religion. I’m trying to understand the clash between fundamentalism and capitalism.”

“Parvez thinks he’s a liberal,” says “Fanatic’s” director Udayan Prasad (“Brothers in Trouble”). “And yet he tries to force his son to follow his path.”

Kureishi, dark-eyed and handsome, bourgeois and anti-bourgeois, says the idea for the movie came to him after reading a story in the Guardian about troubles between Muslim fundamentalists in Brighton and their working-class neighbors. Fascinated by puritanical religions, intolerance toward outsiders, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie and the complexities of fatherhood (Kureishi has 6-year-old twins and a 1-year-old), he envisioned that single moment in which a taxi driver confides to a prostitute in his taxi that he is worried about his son. The movie is set in the north of England, “a place I can only imagine,” Kureishi says.

The original story ends with the father beating his son, an ending that Miramax studio chief Harvey Weinstein wanted to change. (Miramax bought the rights two years ago; it played at Cannes in 1997 and has done the festival circuit for the past two years to rave reviews.)

“He wanted something called a family ending, which has never actually happened to me before,” Kureishi says. “I didn’t want to change it, and he didn’t force me,” although the movie does have a different ending than the story.

“I’m not expecting it to be a big hit,” Kureishi says, but he probably said the same thing about “My Beautiful Laundrette,” the popular mid-’80s film that was directed by Stephen Frears, starred Daniel Day-Lewis and won numerous critics’ awards and was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay.

Both Kureishi and Prasad wanted this film to be very much from the father’s point of view. (Prasad directed the television adaptation of “The Buddha of Suburbia” as well.)

“Kureishi always approaches things from an oblique angle,” Prasad says. “His work is never prosaic, but his themes are huge. This makes for an exciting, flexible project, as opposed to a lecture.

“The length and poem-like purity of the story meant there was a lot to build on. I wanted the audience to experience the world as the father experienced it. I wanted them to ask themselves, ‘So, who’s the real fanatic?’ ”

Many of Kureishi’s works are about children and family and generations bearing down on individuals. He is fond of the particular, the details of daily life, not high drama. “To write something, for me, is to worry about it. It’s the opposite of repressing something, and in this way it is intentionally transgressive. Is it therapeutic? Maybe, because it makes you feel better.

“In real life you’re almost never prepared. I have a 1-year-old who is learning to walk. . . . For him, every step is a crisis. I look for the dramatic moment--I like small stuff, domestic stuff, because that is where the real action is.”

Kureishi admits that playing to the large following he acquired after “Laundrette” has been quite a jolt. “I’ve never moved to Hollywood because I’m not that kind of writer. I pick an odd corner of life that I hope interests people. I crawl into it and try to make it accessible.”

A recent story in Granta, “The Umbrella,” revealed an educated, dignified man with a lot on his mind reduced to stupidity over an umbrella. “The moment when everything you think you are crumbles, that is the moment I’m looking for,” he explains.

Prasad admits to some ambivalence about the power of Hollywood as well. “It creates an interesting tension,” he says. “Which means I have to confront how I feel. I have to choose those aspects of American culture that I find exciting and interesting.”

Kureishi lives in a small flat in West London. He was born in London in 1954 and grew up in the stifling suburbs of south London (“When you grow up there you want to get to where I am now”). He read philosophy at King’s College and had his first play produced in 1976. His father, a “lower middle-class south London businessman,” came from Pakistan to England in the early 1950s.

Kureishi loves London and grumbles a lot less about literary cliques than most writers who live there. “Look, writers are better than actors,” he says. Like a musician who plays many instruments, Kureishi works on several things at once. His latest novel, “Intimacy” (a frightening novel that reveals a man’s thoughts on the night before he plans to leave his wife of 10 years and their two young children), was published last month by Scribner. He has a play opening this month at the National Theatre called “Sleep With Me.” He’s working on a children’s novel and several stories.

“You put the characters on the stage,” he says, characteristically humble--father and son, writer and screenwriter all at once--”and you hope they’ll figure it out for you.”