The Elephant to Hollywood

23 What It’s Really All About

With longer and longer gaps between films I’ve been able to spend more time on the other pleasures in life – the family, friends, my garden and cooking are just some of these, but one of the greatest has been travelling. I’ve been all over the world on location and seen some wonderful places (and some bloody awful ones, too), but when you’re working you can’t be as relaxed about sightseeing as when you’re on holiday. So with a less hectic schedule, Shakira and I have been making up for lost time. It’s been a chance for us not only to revisit our favourite spots, but to explore some new ones, too – and one of the most exciting for us was the trip we took to India in 2005.

Like everyone else, I had pre-conceived notions of what India would be like, both good and bad. I thought I would be outraged by the extraordinary wealth of the few and the grinding poverty of the many, but it wasn’t like that – well, it was in some respects, but in others it wasn’t. Yes, we saw examples of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, but this was a country in which many of the richest people really do have a sense of caring for their poorer neighbours and it’s a country on the move, with a burgeoning middle class, a highly educated workforce with tremendous IT skills, and a real sense of enterprise.

We were travelling in august company. With us was the President of Iceland, Ólafur Grimsson, and his wife Dorrit, both friends of ours, who were there on an official visit, and also Irina Abramovich, the ex-wife of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club. It turned out that my claim to fame in India is as the husband of Shakira – although I did hear a rumour that they have remade Get Carter and The Italian Job in Hindi, so maybe the next time I go I will have achieved some status of my own.

Because we were with such a high-powered group, we were treated like royalty. Our first dinner was in the penthouse suite in the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi as guests of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, and the following day we were invited to have tea with the President, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. His palace, which had been built by the British, was unbelievably grand and stood at the end of an enormous boulevard. All I could think of as I gazed at it was what confidence, insanity and conceit the British must have had to build such pompous edifices to an endless future, surrounded, as they were, by some of the poorest people on the face of the earth. Society in India has changed for the better since those days, but buildings like that still look out of place to me.

The President himself was particularly interesting to me on two counts: first, he was a Muslim, despite the fact that only twenty per cent of India’s population is Muslim, and second, he was a scientist who had played a major part in India’s nuclear missile programme. After tea he showed us round the enormous rose garden. It occurred to me that it occupied a huge amount of space in such an overcrowded city and, perhaps unwisely, I pointed out the injustice of it. He smiled at me innocently. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The British built it.’ ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ I was put politely in my place.

The following day we had tea with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and got another surprise: he was a Sikh, the first non-Hindu Prime Minister of India. Sikhs are an even smaller religious minority than the Muslims and it was a Sikh who had assassinated Mrs Gandhi. I didn’t speak to the Prime Minister much – it was well above my pay grade – and left most of the talking to Ólafur, but I did reflect on the strides India had taken in religious tolerance since Independence – the leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, is an Italian Catholic by birth, the President of India is a Muslim and the Prime Minister is a Sikh. And all this in a country where eighty per cent of the population is Hindu.

One of the most remarkable days we spent in New Delhi was being shown round the former home of Mrs Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by her own Sikh guards in her back garden. The house and garden, which are relatively modest, have been kept exactly as they were on the day she died, as a monument to her. Only two items on display relate to the tragedy of the Gandhi family: the clothes Mrs Gandhi was wearing when she was assassinated, and the clothes worn by her son, Rajiv, when he was blown up by a female suicide bomber as she knelt down to kiss his feet in a gesture of respect. After we had been round the house, we were taken out into the garden. The guide led us along a path and then stopped, pointing down to a small bridge with water running underneath it. At his feet there was a fresh flower. ‘This’, he said, ‘is the spot where Mrs Gandhi was shot.’ And then we walked another twenty or thirty paces further along the path and he said, ‘And this is where Mr Peter Ustinov was standing.’ Peter? None of us had ever heard that Peter Ustinov had been there. ‘What was he doing there?’ I asked, completely confused. ‘He was interviewing her for the BBC,’ said the guide. ‘That was why Mrs Gandhi had come out to the garden in the first place.’ A complete surprise to me.

My next surprise was the following day. We were visiting the gardens of a temple when a monkey leapt out of a tree and stole the glasses right off my nose. It’s a big shock, I can tell you, having your glasses stolen by a monkey, but now I always carry a spare pair just in case there are monkeys around.

After Delhi, we travelled to Agra by car. It took six long hours, but it was extraordinary to see the other side of India gradually unfold in front of our eyes as we left the city behind. We did indeed have to drive round a cow that had decided to sit in the middle of the road and we also had to stop at a railway crossing for a train to go by and, yes, people really did travel on the roof and cling on to the sides of the carriages. But all this was just preparation for something I had been looking forward to ever since my father – who had been a soldier in India – had told me tales of it: the Taj Mahal. We were staying in a beautiful hotel, Amar Vilas, which boasts that you can see the Taj Mahal from every room. I can vouch for this, although I would have preferred not to. I had obviously eaten something that disagreed with me (not, I hasten to add, from the hotel restaurant) and found myself confined to the toilet one afternoon. And, yes, you could even see the Taj Mahal from there…

That evening, Shakira and I strolled out onto the lawn for a first look at the Taj Mahal by moonlight. It really was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen – and certainly the most romantic. To add to the magic, along a road by the side of the hotel came a wedding celebration, singing beautifully as they proceeded with a full band, and illuminated by a thousand bright electric lights. Having had some experience with lighting problems back in my first job at Frieze Films, I immediately looked for the source of the electricity and eventually along it came, right at the end of the procession – an elephant pulling a huge electric generator. We were loving India!

The following morning we made our first visit to the Taj Mahal. You think you know what to expect – after all, it must be the most photographed building in the world – but nothing can prepare you for your first close-up sight of this monument. It is more breathtaking than any picture could ever capture. For the ladies of the party, Dorrit, Irina and Shakira, there was one place of pilgrimage they were determined to visit: what is now known as ‘Diana’s bench’ – the bench on which the troubled Diana sat during her last official visit as Princess of Wales. Each of them sat on it in turn while I took a picture of them, then one of the three of them together and then a passer-by took one of all of us. Honour being satisfied, we then walked through the beautiful garden and into the building itself. Its sombre atmosphere comes as a surprise, but of course the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum to Mumtaz Mahal – the most loved wife of Shah Jahan – who died in childbirth with their fourteenth child. It was an unforgettable experience.

From Agra, we went on to Jaipur, stopping off at temples every now and again. While the others admired the carvings, I used the opportunity to say prayers of thanks for surviving the journey to the temple and to ask for protection as we travelled on to the next. Riding in a car in India can be a shattering experience for a European…

Jaipur seems to me to be exactly what India should look like: a big fortress, a grand palace and streets teeming with women in bright multi-coloured clothes and elephants everywhere. We were invited to dinner by the then chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, a charming woman who invited us to call her ‘Vasu’, much to my relief. She played us a gramophone record of a chant to keep you calm in stressful situations, which consisted of a deep-voiced male singer chanting ‘Ooooooommmm’ over and over again. If you do it right, it vibrates right through your body and calms you right down. Shakira was very interested in it and seems keen for me to practise…

As if learning a chant that could lower my blood pressure wasn’t impressive enough, the following evening was an even more memorable experience. The former Maharaja of Jaipur had invited us to dinner. When we arrived at the palace, we were dropped at the start of the drive up to the front door and got out of the car to find the entire drive lined with a band mounted on elephants and camels decorated with exotic livery and playing the most beautiful music. As we walked through the ancient arch at the end of the drive, we were showered with rose petals by young girls who were seated on the top. It felt as if we were walking through some ancient fable. The dinner was delicious and afterwards we were treated to an extraordinary display of folk dancing in which dancers from all over Rajasthan entertained us – culminating in a finale by a group of tiny women from the mountains who had never before been outside their distant villages. Like most things about India it managed to be both breathtaking and mesmerising.

Although so much of our time was spent being entertained by the great and the good, I also wanted to get a sense of ordinary lives and the way they were changing in the world’s greatest secular democracy. Of course much remains the same. I had been struck by the decorated cart, a bit like a wheelbarrow, I had seen in one of the palaces I had visited, which was, so the tour guide told me, for the late Maharani to be wheeled about the house in. ‘Was she disabled?’ I asked. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘She wore so much jewellery she couldn’t stand up.’ I thought of this the following day when I paid three little girls of five or six to see me safely across a road through what was, to a westerner, simply terrifying traffic. Technological advancement is rushing through India, but it will be a long time coming to most of its population – one wealthy woman I met told me that her electrician didn’t have electricity and her plumber didn’t have plumbing. In the meantime ordinary Indians muddle through with the enterprise and ingenuity that is on display everywhere. As one person I met there said, ‘India is living proof that chaos works.’ It certainly did for me.

New exotic places are exciting to visit but, as I’ve said before, I’m a home-lover at heart. My family, my friends, my house and my garden are the most important things in life as far as I’m concerned and I’m never happier than when I’m entertaining those I love best at home. As you may have guessed, I love to cook – but it was not always like that. I had some very definite dislikes in certain areas when I was younger and it has taken me a long time to get over them.

The first aversion I had to deal with was the habit of putting olive oil on your food. I first came across it on location in Portugal for A Hill in Korea and I thought it was just plain disgusting. My mother always used it for cleaning the wax out of our ears and that, I believed was its sole purpose. Why on earth would you want to put it on your food and eat it? Another thing was blue cheese. In the army I slept in a room with twenty guys and we all had almost permanent athlete’s foot. Because we were all infantrymen we walked about a lot and the cure for athlete’s foot was a blue paint – so we all walked around with blue feet. Whenever I used to see or smell blue cheese, I was taken right back to the army and I didn’t want to be reminded of it! In my early days, that mild cream cheese known as ‘La Vache qui rit’ which is packaged in those little silver triangles, was as far as I’d go in the continental cheese line. My third aversion also stemmed from my days in the army but had its origins in a much more frightening encounter than the blue cheese. The sudden smell of garlic on the night air implied that Chinese soldiers were close by and for years the smell made me feel sick. I’m well over this one, too – although I still don’t like snails in garlic. And then there was the word ‘California’. It’s now one of my favourite places in the world, but when I was a little boy any mention of ‘California’ struck terror in my heart… My mother used to dose me up with California Syrup of Figs and I would then have to spend a very unpleasant day dashing down the three flights of stairs from our flat out to the toilet in the back yard…

Speaking of snails, I have a big problem with them in my garden and I think the French are to blame. I know you might think that the French eat millions of snails each year so how could they be exacerbating my snail problem? It’s because the French eat thrushes, and thrushes eat snails. Now, the French eat a lot of things that I wouldn’t – frogs’ legs, for example – but the frog question does not affect my garden, and the lack of thrushes does. There are fewer and fewer thrushes in my garden each year and more and more snails, so if you want to eat snails, please do so with my blessing – I’m even giving you a very good recipe to encourage you – but please tell your French friends to leave the thrushes alone!

You can eat common or garden snails, and very good they are too, as Gordon Ramsay demonstrated on The F Word. You do need to know what you’re doing when it comes to preparation, though. Collect your snails (allow about eight large ones per person) and rinse them thoroughly under running water. Now you need to put them on a 48-hour fasting programme so they shed their toxins. Keep them in a large jar with some holes for breathing, in the lid, or a small cage from which they cannot escape. At the end of the process, rinse them again. Just make sure you don’t cook a dead snail – they should retract into their shells when poked. There’s no need to salt them or remove any part of their bodies. You can place their jar in the fridge for 24 hours before you cook them. The cold will send them to sleep. Boil the snails vigorously for three minutes, then drain and rinse in cold water with a splash of vinegar. Repeat this rinsing twice more. Then simmer the snails in water with some herbs (a bay leaf and some fresh thyme is perfect) for thirty minutes, drain and remove the snails gently from their shells using a pair of tweezers. If you are planning to use the shells, as per the classic recipe, you need to boil them in a large pan of water with two tablespoons of baking soda for an hour and then allow to dry thoroughly.

8 large snails per person, prepared according to the method above

7g butter

1 tablespoon finely chopped onion

2 large cloves of garlic, minced

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

A squeeze of lemon juice

Pepper and salt

Mash the garlic, butter, onion, parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper together. Press one snail into each clean, dry shell. Fill all the shells with the garlic butter, pressing it down well around the snail. Arrange the shells in a baking dish or special snail dish so they don’t fall over, and bake in a pre-heated oven (220 degrees C, or gas mark 7) for ten minutes.

Serve with hot crusty bread.

Another family favourite of ours is baked potatoes in their skins. It’s easy to do, nutritious and if you follow this recipe from my daughter Natasha, they are delicious. Use one large or two smaller potatoes per person.

Wash the potatoes and then dry them thoroughly. Prick all over with a fork and smear them with olive oil and sea salt. Place them in the microwave for ten minutes. Place them in a pre-heated oven (220 degrees C, or gas mark 7) for an hour.

Michael Winner has always been very complimentary about my roast potatoes – and, as everyone knows, he has exacting standards in the culinary department. You can use one of two types of potatoes: if you want the typical English roast potato, go for Maris Piper. If you want something a bit more delicate and classy, although it’s slightly more tricky, use Mayan Gold. Either way, you soak a bunch of rosemary and a couple of cloves of garlic in a baking tin of olive oil. While you are doing that, boil the potatoes – ten minutes for the Maris Pipers, but only five minutes for the Mayan Golds, or you will have mash. Strain and allow to dry. Dry the saucepan thoroughly and then tip the potatoes back in, and give them a violent shake so that the surface is broken up and they have a fluffy appearance. Take the rosemary and garlic out of the oil and replace with the potatoes, making sure they are well coated. The oil is cold, not pre-heated, and although I can hear chefs screaming, if you do it this way, the oil will sink in. Finally, sprinkle the whole lot with celery salt and place in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees C, gas mark 4, for one and a half hours for the Maris Pipers and one hour for the Mayan Golds. If you do this, you will have the most amazing treat to go with your roast Sunday lunch…

For Saturday lunch, we often eat bruschetta, along with melanzane parmigiana. Shakira cooks the melanzane – she loves aubergine and I have a whole greenhouse full of it. Shakira is a great Italian cook and learnt it all from a lady from Bologna who used to cook for us, but had to retire because of arthritic hands. I’m in charge of the bruschetta – and here’s my favourite recipe, which I got from a restaurant in New York.

Chop a bowl of cherry tomatoes into small pieces and sprinkle with black pepper, salt and celery salt. Mix in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and then a large sprig of chopped basil.

Toast slices of slightly stale ciabatta bread. Rub with garlic and drizzle with olive oil. Pile the tomatoes on top and enjoy yourself!

And while we’re about it, here are some general tips I’ve picked up along the way:

All meat must be room temperature before cooking except hamburger, which holds better if it is slightly cold.

If you want a quick roast chicken, boil it for half an hour first.

For the best toast, run the toaster empty first and then do it again with your bread. (Not very ecologically sound, I know, but it really works.)

If you want very hot English mustard, mix Colman’s mustard powder with milk instead of water.

Before you roast a leg of lamb, rub it with a mixture of olive oil and mint, rosemary and garlic all chopped up together with salt and pepper, and then cover with grated Parmesan cheese.

Sardines, beetroots and tomatoes are all supposed to have anti-ageing properties. I’ve been eating them all my life and I’m still going…

If you want a soft-boiled egg and you boil it ten seconds over two minutes it will be as hard as a rock. (And I’ve always found that if you want a hard-boiled egg, you can often boil it for ten minutes and it will still remain mysteriously soft…)

And my personal favourite – they say that one glass of red wine a day is good for you, so I always drink two on the principle that it must be twice as good for me.