How we made: My Beautiful Laundrette

Stephen Frears, director

When Hanif Kureishi’s script arrived through my letterbox, I wanted to shoot it right away. I’d made Walter, the film that was screened on the first night of Channel 4, and was all in favour of the fact that it was originally to be made for TV. Who in their right mind was going to go to the cinema to see a film about a gay Pakistani running a launderette?

People said the casting was perfect, but it was a fluke. Giving Daniel Day-Lewis the part of Johnny, Omar’s boyfriend, was a peculiar experience. He had come to see me about another project and was talking with a south London accent. I said: “You’re the son of a poet laureate, why are you speaking like that?” He said he’d been to a comprehensive and had adopted it as a defence. Then he wrote me a letter saying he’d kill me if he wasn’t cast. And Shirley Anne Field made Hanif rewrite the part of Rachel, saying: “I’m not putting on red underwear unless you write my character properly.”

We shot it in six months, on a £600,000 budget, entirely on location, using a row of shops in Vauxhall for the launderette and its surrounds. For the home of Papa – Omar’s alcoholic dad, played by Roshan Seth – we needed to convey the idea of trains constantly rolling by. So we found a flat near Battersea power station with seven railway lines right outside its window.

I’d seen Roshan in Gandhi, playing Nehru, India’s first prime minister. And Saeed Jaffrey, who had the part of Omar’s paternal uncle, was in the TV series Gangsters. But neither they nor Gordon Warnecke (Omar) are actually from Pakistan. The insight into the Pakistani community came from Hanif, who was on set all the time, larking about and driving me mad. The lead characters were modelled on his uncles, about whom he spoke constantly. One of them had suggested turning a lavatory at Shepherd’s Bush into a nightclub. They have actually done that now, so perhaps he was ahead of his time.

Back then, if you’d asked me what was important about the film, I’d have said economics, since the homosexual element was really quite straightforward. It was the first time jokes about Mrs Thatcher had been made in the cinema and they got huge laughs. The film ended up being a big cinema hit and changed the lives of everyone involved. There was a reunion recently and the wonderful thing was that we were all there. Nobody had died.

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Gordon Warnecke, actor

I got to kiss both Daniel and Shirley. I was most happy about kissing her, to be honest. Daniel and I were called the Listerine Kids – since our characters seemed to be forever kissing people, we were constantly tipping it back before takes.

The film had this theme of trains passing through, which was great, but it made the scenes in Papa’s flat really tricky. We had to hit the dialogue at the exact right moment – in between trains hurtling past. And the party scenes had to take place at night, but they took so long to shoot, the sun was coming up. So the producer said we had to the get the last scene in one take. We did it in three minutes.

Daniel has this intense reputation, but he was a complete gentleman. We went out to lunch one day and talked about our upbringings. Despite playing a Pakistani of mixed parentage, I’m half South American and half German. He’s from south London and a Millwall supporter, so was totally in tune with his part, even with his establishment background.

Shirley was also a diamond. My dad had been a fan of hers when she was a 1960s starlet. When he met her at the preview, he was besotted. He kept saying to me: “You lucky boy!” He was a lifelong socialist, so I’m proud of the bit in the film where they’re calling Papa a communist and I defend him by insisting he’s a socialist. There’s a big difference, which people seem to have forgotten.

None of us had any idea the film would become so big. We were just making a little film in south London about two guys running a launderette. Then it snowballed. I get letters from film school students all the time now – apparently, Daniel and I are the iconic figures of the 1980s.

• My Beautiful Laundrette screens at the BFI, London, on 15 December (with a Q&A with Stephen Frears and Gordon Warnecke) and 29 and 30. Details of further UK screenings here.