http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article5001151.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 A Passage to India: Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy talk about their critically acclaimed new film [image: Slumdog Millionaire]
Slumdog Millionaire Tom Charity *Watch a clip from Slumdog Millionaire*<http://www.foxsearchlight.com/slumdogmillionaire/> ** Danny Boyle is up and running again. The man who gave us the euphoric highs and gutter lows of Trainspotting, with Iggy Pop lusting for life as Ewan McGregor pounded down Princes Street, who gave the zombie movie a jolt of adrenaline in 28 Days Later and tried to set fire to the stars in the sci-fi thriller Sunshine, might just have a monster hit on his hands with his latest, *Slumdog Millionaire*, a tale of an 18-year-old orphan from the Mumbai slums who reaches the final of *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?*This is an improbable story in every way, touching on tectonic cultural and economic shifts, the unwieldy apparatus of the movie business, the mysterious, alchemical nature of audience response and the latest reversal of fortune in a directorial career that is proving as predictable as next week's stock prices. As recently as August, it looked as if Slumdog Millionaire would go undistributed in North America. A little movie about Indian slum children, with subtitles and no stars, didn't seem like a natural fit in cinemas dominated by the Dark Knight and Harry Potter. Boyle's name probably wasn't much of an inducement, either. The excitement that surrounded Shallow Grave and Trainspotting has long since dissipated after the back-to-back flops A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach. Although 28 Days Later was a cult hit, Boyle has never approached blockbuster status in America and his last film, Sunshine, returned just $4m in the region, on a budget of about $50m. Produced by Film4 and Pathé in the UK (where it is the closing gala film at the Times BFI London Film Festival on Thursday), Slumdog had significant funding from Warner Independent, the so-called speciality division responsible for lower-budget "prestige" movies such as In the Valley of Elah, The Painted Veil and Infamous. RELATED LINKS - Boyle explains why Mumbai is a key location<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article4867902.ece> - Boyle returns to squalor and form<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article4669581.ece> In May, however, Warner Bros took a look at the numbers and decided it could no longer afford to be in the prestige business, leaving Slumdog in limbo. (At much the same time, Paramount reached the same conclusion and shut down Paramount Vantage, the division that released the Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men last year.) In Boyle's words, "We were dead and buried" — but it wasn't as over as it felt. Warner allowed Peter Rice at Fox Searchlight to take a look at the film and, in a highly unusual move, the rival studios agreed terms enabling Fox Searchlight to release the picture in North America next month, with a British release planned for January. Right now, that looks like a smart deal on Fox's part. The movie premiered at the upmarket Telluride film festival at the end of August, and critics exhausted their stock of superlatives on it. So much so that when Boyle introduced the film at the Toronto Film Festival a week later, he was already careful to damp down sky-high expectations. He need not have bothered. The sellout Toronto crowd was enraptured (Slumdog won the audience award) and "this year's Juno" is being touted as a dark horse for the Academy Awards — which would be a first for Boyle. When we met in Toronto the day after the public screening, he was, as usual, modest and taking nothing for granted. At the same time, he knew the movie had "played" — he would have to have been comatose not to have sensed it. In fact, you could pinpoint the exact moment when the audience fell in love with it. It's a scene a little over five minutes in. We have already seen 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) in the hot seat of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, preparing to answer the last, 20-million-rupee question. We have also, jarringly, seen him brutally beaten and interrogated by a couple of deeply suspicious policemen. How can an illiterate chai boy from the slums have known so many correct answers, they want to know — is he a genius, a cheat or just plain lucky? Thereby hangs an unabashedly romantic and picaresque tale. In the first flashback accounting for his improbable knowledge, we find the seven-year-old Jamal trapped in a wooden outhouse built on a rickety pier that overlooks a private airport. Desperate to greet his favourite Bollywood star, Jamal realises that there's only one thing for it. He takes a deep breath and plunges into the stinking cesspool beneath the pier. Covered in crap, he walks up to the star and demands his autograph. The sequence may be shamelessly contrived, but the close correlation between money and excrement speaks volumes about India — and not just India, for that matter. Boyle, who looks like an overgrown street urchin himself, laughs when I draw the obvious comparison with a similarly placed scene in Trainspotting, in which McGregor dives into the filthiest lav in Scotland to find his drug-filled suppositories. He claims it is a British quirk: "We're obsessed. At least one in every two British films has a toilet scene. It's rare in other cultures." Slumdog's screenwriter, Simon "The Full Monty" Beaufoy, who has adapted Vikas Swarup's bestselling novel Q&A for the film every bit as freely as the inspired title change suggests, confirms the scene was written more than a year before Boyle came on board. "I read the book, then I hung out in Mumbai and wandered around the slums for weeks," he says. "Those piers are in the Juhu slum. They're big, long piers with wooden shitters at the end, which are open, and you can sit there and watch the film stars landing at the private airstrip — a grandstand view! I thought I really had to write that in. The scenes just come at you like a train in a place like that." The cast was largely local, with 10 personnel brought in from the UK. And with the exception of the slimline Patel, from Channel 4's Skins, as the teenage Jamal (cast because young Indian actors all work out), Boyle found the kids in Mumbai with the help of a local casting director, Loveleen Tandan, who worked with the younger children and wound up with a co-director credit. As Jamal anxiously explains to the authorities how the school of hard knocks has prepped him for the quiz show's questions, he thereby relates his life story: a tale of hardship and suffering, endurance and love, involving his older brother, Salim, and an orphaned girl they meet, Latika. There's something Dickensian about this bold conflation of realism, adventure and melodrama. Dumas's Three Musketeers also informs its romantic spirit — simply because Beaufoy happened to see Disney's Three Mouseketeers on television during one of his trips to the slum. "It clicked with me because of the three kids," he says. "Dumas allowed me to be as romantic and operatic as I wanted." In Britain, he says, we are too comfortable to produce truly visceral writing. "If it's noisy, you shut the double glazing. If it's raining, you get a taxi — and our stories are subtle and refined. India is intense and smelly, the colours are incredible, it's terrifying and fascinating and energising. The operatic and the melodramatic are things I would normally steer away from, but here it feels absolutely appropriate." Boyle had the same reaction. "I loved it," he says, not for the last time. "Mumbai is like New York in the 1980s. It has that potential, the electricity coming out of the place is phenomenal." He even scheduled the second unit's activities so he could keep shooting on his days off. "I would still be there now. They had to drag me away to edit it." RELATED LINKS - Boyle explains why Mumbai is a key location<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article4867902.ece> - Boyle returns to squalor and form<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article4669581.ece> He says India reinvigorated him — and it shows. Largely shot on a prototype digital camera system (SI-2K), the movie has deep, dark tones and vibrant textures, but is as light and fleet as anything Boyle has done since Trainspotting. He doesn't turn away from poverty, but he doesn't fetishise it either. Rather, he embraces the extreme contrasts and runs with them: the squalor of the slums (there's a harrowing sequence in which we see orphans blinded and dismembered by a Fagin-like character) and the rapid transformation that is sweeping across this hypercapitalist 21st- century superpower. The one isn't necessarily better than the other, but the energy is infectious. "There's no attitude other than survival, and 'Let's go, come on'," Boyle enthuses. Think of a Boyle film and it's the momentum that grabs you, the drive. He rates sensation over nuance, invention over reflection, and he's not afraid of catching the eye; in fact, he would catch your eye with every shot if he could. He wants to dazzle us, and in this movie, he certainly does. "You get those terrible films with westerners in foreign cultures, and it's all kind of distant," he says. "You can't stand apart from it. I thought the only way it would have any truthfulness was if I chucked myself right in it." *Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?* fulfils the role of the westerner in this film. ("That's our white guy," as Boyle puts it.) Safe and familiar, it allows us a point of entry into this strange world. But didn't the television quiz show object to the suggestion that a winning contestant might be pulled off and tortured at the drop of a hat? Apparently not: as it happens, the movie's producer, Christian Colson, was a co-founder of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? who sold his stake some years ago for a not-so-small fortune, which he uses as venture capital for films like this one. And he cannily retained the right to use the name of the show in a feature. No flies on Colson. What about the Indian government — surely they had something to say about such dodgy PR? Boyle laughs again: "We told them about the torture. They said, 'That's fine, as long as nobody above the rank of inspector is involved.' Which shows how endemic it is." Beaufoy visited the country 20 years ago as a teenager. "Then, there were lots of colonial echoes around," he recalls. "That's all been wiped clean. The India we think we know — Gandhi and cricket and the Raj — that's over. Now it's capitalism on steroids. You say you're from London and it means nothing to the kids there. China they're interested in, America kind of, but not so much. They've turned their back on the west because we're just not moving fast enough for them. It makes you feel very small. Our time is over, and America can't save us." Beaufoy talks about a slum location he found during his wanderings around Mumbai. Returning to show Boyle a year later, he found the slum had been razed and they were staring at a brand-new high-rise: "In a year! In Britain, it would take that long to put up a sign." "Part of the reason this film works is that Mumbai and Danny are really similar," he adds. "Absolutely intense and committed. The harder it got, the bigger the smile on Danny's face became. There were times when I was really scared. We filmed in the city's red-light district and thousands of people gathered round to watch. It could easily have got out of hand at any point. But Danny just feeds off that energy." Ask Boyle about his previous movie and you begin to understand why Mumbai was more his natural speed. "Sunshine took three years," he scowls. "That's too long. You make good decisions, then you get so bored, you start playing around with bad ones. I wanted to make something very different, very quickly." Right now, he's not sure what's next, but one possibility obviously tickles him: "Anil Kapoor [who plays the police captain in the film] says Slumdog would never play to a mainstream Indian audience because it would have to be much more extreme for them. He's trying to get the Hindi rights for a remake. I'd love to see a Bollywood version. In fact, I'd love to be the assistant director on it. . ." *Slumdog Millionaire closes the Times BFI London Film Festival on Thursday and opens nationwide on January 23*
