Sarah Gavron is the British director of Brick Lane, the film adaptation of the bestselling novel by Monica Ali. To coincide witht the release of the DVD this week Three's A Crowd's Caroline Butcher caught up with Gavron on the highs and lows of making her first feature.

Three’s a Crowd: It was quite a brave step to choose the adaptation of such a popular novel for your first feature film. What attracted you to the story in the first place?

Sarah Gavron: Well it was daunting but irresistible, because the story worked on so many different levels. I read the book at the time when everybody read it, on the London underground with their heads buried in it, and I loved it.

It’s a compassionate portrait of a family set against the shifting cultural landscape of London, and I do think that many of the most interesting stories of today are coming out of those immigrant communities.

I think above all it’s a very human story – it’s not about stereotypes or easy answers on arranged marriage. It’s about the journey of this woman, Nazneen, finding her voice and place in the world, and the story of how life circles. She’s sent here in an arranged marriage and it’s a hopeful story of her finding home in a country that has been alien to her for so long. It’s about integration.

There’s also the love story between her and Karim, which takes her breath away but doesn’t last, and the love she has for Chanu, which builds. So it was all those things that I thought were so resonant and that appealed across cultures and generations in the book, and I thought that if I could somehow translate that to the screen that would be rather wonderful.

Three’s a Crowd: During the film’s production and release, a lot of controversy swelled up within the Bangladeshi community. How did you deal with this?

Sarah Gavron: It’s interesting to unpack what happened, in a way. We went into the community about eight months before the shoot and I feel that as an outsider and as a director, it’s very important that you can make films about worlds outside your own experience.