Gurinder Chadha talks about Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

Bend It Like Beckham opened the door to Hollywood for its director, Gurinder Chadha, but she chose instead to work on a British film and get back on the path to national treasurehood.

A couple of months ago, I sat in an editing room two floors above a bustling Soho street with the British film director Gurinder Chadha, best known for Bend It Like Beckham, and an editor named Martin Walsh. They were perusing, frame by frame, a scene from Chadha's new film, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, adapted from a bestselling children's book in diary form by the author Louise Rennison.

It is an amusing story, recounting the domestic and romantic ups and downs of a 14-year-old English girl, and the scene Chadha and Walsh were trying hard to perfect is one of the film's comic highlights. Its heroine, Georgia Nicolson (played by the rising British star Georgia Groome), is determined to make herself more sophisticated to impress a boy on whom she has a mad crush. To this end, she has availed herself of 'snogging lessons', offered to any girls wishing to brush up their technique, by Peter, an enterprising schoolmate.

We watched the scene over and over again; Chadha chuckled each time. Peter (Liam Hess) uses his bedroom for these sessions, and explains to his nervous clients the intricacies of snogging in the smooth, practised tones of a confident salesman. He charges a modest sum for the service, uses appropriate background music, and keeps a meter running to count down to the lesson's end.

The humour in the scene comes from its innocence and awkwardness. Chadha and Walsh (an Oscar-winner for Chicago) talked it back and forth, and decided they needed to cut faster between the couple and the meter, which shows they are running out of time. Then came the choice of music: they agreed that Neil Diamond's Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon might be just the sort of tune to appeal to the debonair Peter.

Their instincts were spot on. The moment Diamond's sonorous voice is heard - a total contrast to the excruciating embarrassment of the scene that it accompanies - the effect is hilarious. The three of us roared with laughter, mingled with relief; it had taken almost an hour to tweak this small scene to its present state. 'Well, that's that!' Chadha said merrily. 'Next!'

Then all hell broke loose. The doors burst open, and in marched Chadha's husband and creative partner, the Japanese-American filmmaker Paul Mayeda Berges. He held a baby girl, who had just woken, blinking in the light. Behind came the couple's nanny, holding a baby boy with serious, inquisitive eyes.

These are the couple's twins, who were born in June last year, when Chadha was 47. 'You can see we got one of each!' said the amiable Berges. He was clearly talking about more than gender; their daughter, Kumiko, looks distinctly Japanese, while her dark, grave-faced brother, Ronak, testifies to Chadha's Punjabi ancestry.

Chadha immediately swept little Ronak up in her arms. 'Oh yeah, plaster his hair down over his forehead,' she said, doing precisely that, 'and he looks just like a little Indian accountant! Which is something we all could do with!'

The twins had been brought round from the couple's Soho flat for a brief mid-morning visit and cuddle with mum and dad; after 20 minutes they were on their way, and Chadha and Berges, admirably compartmentalising their careers and domestic lives, returned to work on the film.

This was just a tiny glimpse of the multi-tasking required of Chadha in getting Angus made for Paramount Pictures. When she learnt in November 2006 that she was pregnant, she and Berges were in Hollywood; she was preparing to direct a film version of the 1980s television series Dallas for 20th Century Fox, with a glittering cast: John Travolta as the conniving oil tycoon JR Ewing, Jennifer Lopez as his alcoholic wife, Sue Ellen, Luke Wilson as JR's nicer brother Bobby, and Shirley Maclaine as the Ewing family matriarch Miss Ellie.

Dal