"It was one of the key lines of what this film is about. And part of the film is about the invisible nature of an underclass of society, which is fundamental to the way it runs. It needs this subclass that will work in menial tasks for very little money because they have dubious status in the country. And that sort of slips into crime, things that are illegal, prostitution and so on. This whole sub-society develops on those principles and then is politely ignored by mainstream society."
Ejiofor's parents fled the civil war in Nigeria during the 1960s and eventually settled in London, where his father became a doctor and his mother a pharmacist. Though they were welcomed by the British government as refugees, they still suffered what Ejiofor calls "the shock of being devalued when you were previously valued. I think it's a shock that will be with them until the day they die. The impact of being judged and devalued because of skin color was thoroughly unknown [to them] because nobody teaches you that when you're in school in Nigeria. What you receive from the West is images of this lovely place with people who are always happy and trying to do their best for the world. When you get here and some guy has had a brick thrown through his window and you can't get a job, suddenly you realize it's this whole other world that you better start to understand."
"They have to find their way against degrees of hostility, as my parents did," Ejiofor says of these economic refugees, many of them from former Iron Curtain countries. "The only difference is that everybody going through this is white. The strange thing about this film for me is that if Senay's character was from West Africa, I would relate to [the hostility] in exactly the way my parents did [as a race issue]. Because of the change in the world, race is much less relevant. It becomes an issue of what subclasses are, what people are exploited, and how poverty is an exploited commodity to the wealthy."
"If I were making a film in America, I have to have American actors because they fill in the gaps that I don't understand. I just assumed that a British African actor would know far more than I knew. Having a British African actor in it meant that I simply believed what I was looking at."
| Three quotes from actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, and then a quote from director Stephen Frears, stand out in John Clark's Los Angeles Times article "Tailor-made for the role and vice-versa" about "Dirty Pretty Things," directed by Frears and starring Ejiofor alongside actress Audrey Tautou.
posted in articles on July 30, 2003 4:04 PM | t (0)
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This movie totally rocks
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