Chunky Pandey Quotes

I feel I can express the nuances of the Bengali lifestyle and ways of thinking better than other cultures.

I am a Bengali, I like my rice.

I'd say, in some ways, I'm very Bengali. I have a love of the arts - dance, music, visual arts - which I think is a very Bengali trait. I also love food, which I know is very Bengali!

I have always wanted to work in a Bengali film.

Being a Bengali, I have kept in touch with the cinema of my mother tongue.

I make American films for American audiences and Asian films for Asian audiences.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

I've benefited from the best of both societies and both cultures, East and West.

I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

I interviewed a lot of people in India, and I asked my mother to send me a lot of Bengali books on the tradition of dream interpretation. It's a real way for me to remember how people think about things in my culture.

I am the bridge between the East and the West. I don't want to abandon one for the other.

I just love the sound of a black woman's voice.

Personally, I don't give a toss about French viewers. I make films for foreigners - it's a bit like Ken Loach, who's not very popular in England but has had a lot of success in France. Cinema is always an experience in a foreign body.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

There's something that people misunderstand about screen quotas. It's not about rejecting or hating other countries' films, but about protecting our domestic film industry.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

I'm so used to Australian films not getting a release outside Australia.

I was lucky that one of my first movies, 'One Million Years B.C.' was made in Europe by a British company. The Brits, and a lot of the rest of Europe, seemed to really love exotic women. The fact that I was American and exotic just made me more appealing to them.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

People and their cultures perish in isolation, but they are born and reborn in contact with other men and women, with man and woman or another culture, another creed, another race.

I live in Australia, and I am Australian, and because I grew up in an era where we didn't have a film industry, and now we do, it's just really exciting for me to be able to say that I work in my own culture in a medium that I find fascinating.

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.