MoviesOnline: Why is the sound like that so important to you, and how will you enforce it in regular movie theatres? DANNY BOYLE: You can’t sadly. Seventy percent of a movie – I mean, everybody raves on about cinematographers and all that kind of stuff, but seventy percent of a movie is sound. You watch any movie without sound and you’re finished, virtually none of them survive. That’s what’s extraordinary about Wall-E, you know the first half of Wall-E which is virtually a silent movie, they are the geniuses and they can get away with it for about an hour. Forget it, without sound you’re lost, so it’s very important. But it’s also in this case, music in Indian films are very – I love the way the music is much more upfront, it’s much more passionate and declared, whereas we tend to hide music. It kind of creeps in. You’re not aware of it at the beginning and it’s floating around, and then it jumps on it. Indian music is like, here’s the music everyone – da-da-da-da, it’s there and I love that. And I said to Rahman, the guy who did the music for us, I said, ‘The one thing I promise you is I’ll mix it upfront, whatever you produce for us, I promise it will be upfront like that.’
MoviesOnline: Is it okay with you if I get the DVD and make it a little bit lower? DANNY BOYLE: You won’t be able to on the DVD. I can preset levels on that. MoviesOnline: Where did you get that incredible music? DANNY BOYLE: This guy A.R. Rahman, he’s just the most amazing composer, he’s a beautiful composer, lovely man, very sweet man, very famous, so famous in India, I mean staggering fame, and yet so modest and gentle. It’s a really interesting time there because what’s happening is there’s the classical way of scoring there, which is songs really, and then there’s R & B and Hip Hop is coming in from America, flooding in from America, and house music and disco is coming in from Europe more, so you’ve got this fusion going on of styles. And, of course, the city is all styles, and the film is a lot of styles of different things – there’s romantic bits, there’s melodramatic bits, there’s almost hideous, almost horror bits, and people say, ‘How do you balance all those things?’ You don’t, you just put them in because that’s what the city is like. And it’s the same with the music. He just did that, he just uses all these different elements in it. He’s got sitar in it at one moment, and the next moment it sounds like Beyonce and Jay-Z, it sounds like their stuff suddenly, so you’ve got this huge mixer going on, and I love that. http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_15891.html
