|
|
| Interview: Danny Boyle on "Slumdog Millionaire" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The director of such hits as "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" talks about his latest film, the utterly enchanting India-based comedy-drama "Slumdog Millionaire."
After making his big-screen directorial debut in 1994 with the stylishly violent crime drama “Shallow Grave” and creating an international sensation two years later with the Oscar-nominated hit “Trainspotting,” British-born filmmaker Danny Boyle has carved out one of the most diverse filmographies of any director working today--he has given us a screwball comedy-fantasy (the underrated “A Life Less Ordinary”), a hallucinatory youth drama (“The Beach”), a terrifying low-budget horror extravaganza (“28 Days Later”), an utterly endearing children’s story (“Millions”) and an elaborate sci-fi epic (“Sunshine”). With his latest and arguably finest film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” he tells the fascinating story of a young man (Dev Patel) who lands on India’s equivalent of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and does so well that he has made it to the final question. The only trouble is, he does so well, especially for an orphan who raised himself on the streets of Mumbai amid the crushing poverty, that he is suspected of cheating and is dragged off by the police in order to explain how he could possibly come up with the answers. In response, he begins to tell his life story--a saga of romance of romance and betrayal and even a few laughs here and there--and as each chapter is recounted, we discover how he came upon each piece of information required to answer the questions.
Although “Slumdog Millionaire” may not sound like much at first glance, I can assure you that it is not only infinitely better than the basic premise make it sound, it is quite possibly the most crowd-pleasing film to emerge in 2008--while it tells a story filled with pain, hurt and betrayal, it does so in such a joyful and exciting manner that I can’t imagine any moviegoer not responding to its charms. And yet, despite the enormous praise it has received from critics and audiences (it won the prestigious Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival), it seemed as recently as a few weeks ago that it might never actually play in America. Recently, Boyle got on the phone to discuss that particular misadventure as well as some other tales behind the making of “Slumdog Millionaire.”
How do you feel that you have changed and developed as a filmmaker from the time of your first feature film, 1994’s “Shallow Grave,” to your latest work, “Slumdog Millionaire”?
I honestly think, in a funny kind of way, that your first film is your best film. It may not be your most technically achieved or your most successful, but in a funny kind of way, there is something about it that you never quite achieve again, which is a sense of wonder. Sometimes, you really don’t know what you are doing and ironically, that is a very good place to be in terms of storytelling because you can tell the story with a kind of freshness that you can never quite get back to. I tend to do very different films and I think that one of the reasons--I like to throw myself in the deep end and abandon all my skills in order to go back to the beginning again. It was certainly like that in India and that was such an extraordinary experience. You are always trying to get back to that kind of purity becomes sometimes the flashy skills can be a barrier.
How did “Slumdog Millionaire” come your way and what was it about it that appealed to you?
They sent the script and my agent rather lazily said that it was a film about “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and he knew that I wouldn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to make a film about “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” I read it because Simon Beaufoy had written it and I knew that he had written “The Full Monty” and was a terrific writer. I felt that I ought to read it and so I decided to read half of it in order to be respectful and after 10 or 15 pages, I just knew that I was going to make it. Another one of my theories is that if you make a decision about doing a film while reading it, don’t wait until you get to the end because if you do, then all the question about filmmaking come in about how you are going to cast it or who you are going to make a deal with. I wanted that feeling to be what the audience got--up to 10 or 15 pages and completely lost in this world and seeing it from the inside very subjectively as though you were there.
As you mentioned, each one of your projects tends to very greatly from the previous one. In the case of “Slumdog Millionaire,” was part of its appeal the fact that it would allow you to film outdoors in a more spontaneous manner than what I presume was the stage-bound and fairly controlled circumstances of your previous film, the sci-fi epic “Sunshine”?
Very much so. The isolation of outer space with just a few people is a very particular kind of world and if you want to contrast with it, then India, particularly the streets of India, is a phenomenal difference. I was aware of just what a great contrast that was and I really embraced it. I loved that difference and it really invigorated me to be able to do it and make that change. It also causes you to have a very particular approach, I think, because you can’t control Mumbai in the way that a film director, especially a film director working on something like “Sunshine,” can control everything. You just have to go with it because it is not a controllable and fixed thing that you have to be open to--there is a lot of stuff that you aren’t going to get because it is just impossible but you can capture enough of it to make you feel like you’ve been there.
Most of your films have dealt with characters who are outsiders from society in one way or another and “Slumdog Millionaire” is obviously part of that tradition. Can you talk about your fascination with that particular idea both in general terms and in how it applies to this particular film?
Obviously, I love the underdog, I guess. I’m not one to do the period dramas with the country houses. I’ve always liked the feeling of being an outsider or an underdog--in some ways, it reflects my own life a bit, I suppose. I come from a small place and was thrown into this amazing world after a couple of successes. I guess it does reflect that. In this case, I just loved this guy’s character and how sunny it is. If you want to know about this guy’s character, it is all in the scene where he jumps into the shit in order to get out of a bad situation. That is his character right there--it doesn’t matter what he has to do to get what he needs, he will do it.
One of the fascinating thing about “Slumdog Millionaire” is that the story it tells is often sad and despairing but the way you tell it is anything but--it is a very bold, beautiful and energetic film and yet, it never sugarcoats the darker aspects of the story or its environment.
I think it is a reaction to living and working there during the time we were making it. It is impossible to ignore that there are some horrific things but if you are overwhelmed by all of that, you won’t get anywhere. You have to deal with it in your mind--you see people who have been deliberately maimed in order to be better beggars and it is a challenge to get your head around that. My overwhelming experience with the place was with the energy and resourcefulness of the people despite everything--their resilience was just extraordinary. They defied the British, so they have to be resourceful people. You get introduced to it so quickly that you have to adapt yourself, not India, to it. You have to learn how to tell a story in the most honest way. Compared to the other films that I have seen that have been set there, the kind of colonial filmmaking, I wanted to create a style that was more like Scorsese in New York and tell the story as if you were experiencing it.
Had you been to India before making this film?
I hadn’t, actually. I had always intended to because my father was there during the war as an ordinary soldier. He had been trained in Bombay in order to invade Japan. I always remember him saying that when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he and his mates were so relieved because they knew that there was going to be a pretty strong chance that they would die over there in Japan. He loved India and he would get very cross because British television in the Sixties and Seventies was full of very racist stuff about India and that always used to annoy him.
What was the casting process like for this film?
There is no lack of good actors over there because there are a lot of films being made in Mumbai and a lot of actors around to appear in those films. The problem was that we had to cast nine people to play three characters and that balance is hard--you find one person who is really amazing and then you have to find two other people who could plausibly be them at different stages in life. That was kind of a tricky thing. I think that the biggest thing was that the little kids didn’t speak English, so we had to do the beginning of the film in Hindi, which is obviously a danger of being a barrier for western audiences. However, as with everything else in the film, we tried to embrace that as a positive thing, so we made the subtitles exciting and exhilarating to watch.
The biggest single problem that I had was that unlike the west, where most actors are looking for work and they are yours for the whole duration of the film, all the Indian actors are doing five or six movies at a time. You’ll say to them that you are doing their big scene on Tuesday and they’ll say “I’m not available on Tuesday. I can do it Thursday between 2 and 6.” These are the things that you have to deal with and that was my biggest problem.
Considering some of the content in “Slumdog Millionaire” regarding the game show, was it difficult to get the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” people to sign off on the film?
No, it was very simple. The production company whose film this is, which is called Celador, is run by a producer name Christian Colson who works for them. They developed the game show--in fact, that is where their money comes from because they sold it a few years ago for something like $350 million or some incredible figure--and what they did, very wisely, was to keep the opportunity to legally make a film containing it. I think it was just one of those lawyer’s footnotes where they cover every possible option. When (executive producer) Tessa Ross and Channel Four television began to develop this, they sent it to Selador in order to get permission to do it and they got it because while they aren’t the producers anymore, they still have some insider power still left and so we were allowed to get away with it. If we hadn’t had that, we might have had some issues, yeah/
Obviously, “Slumdog Millionaire” has been a favorite with critics and audiences every since it began screening at festivals. And yet, right before it was set to show at the Toronto Film Festival, Warner Brothers, who had the rights to distribute the film through a deal with the now-defunct Warner Independent Films division, dumped it from their roster and it was without a distributor until Fox Searchlight came in and snagged the rights. What was that all about?
What happened is that Warners closed Warner Independent, which is who our deal was with and who was going to distribute the film. It looked like a bit of a drama, to say the very least. There again, you just have to go with it and see what happens. What happened was that after the screenings at Telluride and Toronto, there was a lot of interest in the film. To credit Warner, they then showed it--secretly, I believe--to Fox Searchlight and they took over the film. Warners still has some interest in it but it is now a Fox Searchlight film in North America. Weirdly enough, considering it is a film about an underdog, it was quite a reversal of fortune for us as well. To be honest, a few weeks ago, we looked dead in the water in terms of distribution in North America--it looked like it would never come out or it would go straight to DVD. It was a terrible thing but it has turned into a really good thing now. I think in terms of distribution, you can’t do better than Fox Searchlight for a film like this.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2617
originally posted: 11/12/08 16:31:37
last updated: 11/12/08 16:52:09
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed
