“It’s 400 awards at the moment, but a couple of other film festivals have been in contact, so it might go up a couple more,” says Chopra with a modest laugh. “But that’s enough really.”
All that attention might become the norm. “The Cognition feature film will be something really quite ambitious,” says Chopra, on a video call from near London – which itself features prominently in the first film in the shape of the derelict (now restored) Battersea Power Station.
“We’ve taken all the best elements from the short film and developed a feature film script. I’m working full throttle on adding the finishing touches.”
He married Shu Qi, has a bromance with Daniel Wu: Hong Kong’s Stephen Fung
He married Shu Qi, has a bromance with Daniel Wu: Hong Kong’s Stephen Fung
Chopra also wrote the original story and was the 27-minute-film’s producer. As the project’s momentum has grown, so has the “well-established team” that surrounds him – although even the expanded film’s director can’t yet confirm the line-up.
“I’m not allowed to say, until it’s official, who the cast members are,” he says apologetically. “But I am trying to work with the original key cast from the short film.”
British film critic Mark Kermode called Cognition “a short film that is calling out to be a feature”; and when it becomes one Chopra will reach another milestone. He is now employed as a contractor for the BBC, where he is a producer-director.
When at the corporation full time, he says, he worked “as an associate producer, helping to put all the logistics together; as a location manager; and I directed a few experimental bits”.
That resulted in a résumé embracing contributions to such familiar BBC Film (formerly Films) titles as Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016). But was the underlying aim to have his name on the back of the director’s chair?
“Yes, 100 per cent, that was already the ambition early on,” he says. “I tried for seven years to get into BBC Films and after my third interview, I did. I wanted to work at the heart of the British film industry. And the goal there was to get as much experience as possible.
“I’ve watched so many amazing directors and actors work on so many film sets and the idea was to direct something while at the BBC that would be my breakthrough project. That was Cognition.”
What Chopra calls his “dystopian sci-fi drama” might sound like it comes from a different planet to Wolverhampton, in the English Midlands, where he grew up. But in one respect they are closely related.
Chopra’s family, originally from the Indian state of Punjab, ran a video shop (in homage, his production company bears its name: Talash Video Centre) and from the age of six he would play VHS tapes above the shop, absorbing “Bollywood cinema, Hong Kong movies, world cinema, so many classic films”, including, from Shaw Brothers, The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), he says.
But the Chopras also ran and lived above a pub, which would regularly turn into a cinema. “We were surrounded by a strong Indian community and it became a place for them to ingest Indian culture,” says Chopra.
As well as science fiction, the crime genre has always fascinated Chopra.
“The next feature film I’ll be doing will be a crime film – prison drama,” he says, although Bollywood exerts a certain pull. “It would be an amazing experience to direct a Bollywood film, that’s definitely on the dream list. When you’ve grown up with three sisters you pick up the dancing – it’s just in the blood!” he says.
For now, Chopra will just have to waltz with some of Hollywood’s biggest players. He is fresh off a flight from Los Angeles, where he hosted a Cognition screening at Soho House on Sunset Boulevard, a film executive’s venue of choice. And jostling for feature-film rights has already begun.
“There were some substantial executives there who loved the film,” says Chopra, “and four really well-known production companies also waiting for it.”
Chopra is undeniably in the right job. “When I watch a mind-blowing film I like to watch it again and again to see how it’s been done,” he says. “Inception is one of my favourites. I broke it down in intricate detail. Got the script, sat there, read it and watched how the film was structured on paper. Fascinating. Took me hours.”
At the suggestion that he might be a committed movie nerd, Chopra enthusiastically agrees. “Yeah, you have to be!” he says. “Who else is going to sit there and do that? You’d have to be crazy!”