Slumdog's Great Energy Was Inspiring: Rahman DANNY BOYLE'S Slumdog Millionaire continues its triumphant march across North America.
The movie has earned four Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture-Drama, Director,Screenplay and Original Score as also six more from the Critics' Choice Awards. N.E.E.T / Interscope Records released Composer A.R.Rahman's Sound track of the movie which was already available on line , in stores on December 23 which included previously unreleased M.I.A. / Rahman collaboration " O … Saya in its 13 items . " A.R.Rahman was in Los Angeles to participate in a couple of screenings to promote the movie and his music in the production and spoke to India Journal briefly about his involvement with "Slumdog Millionaire." Rahman said that Director Danny Boyle had heard his music and felt that he would be the best to produce a score which would be true to the movie. He added that in some ways it was like working on a Bollywood production and even though it contains certain sensibilities which are British, the screenplay is basically Indian. In fact he pointed out that it was actually easier composing for Slumdog Millionarie than for a Hindi movie as it required far less than the typical 200 odd cues required for a home production. His biggest challenge he said was the time frame in which to deliver the goods. Rahman came into the picture two months before the mixing and he started the scoring a mere two weeks ahead of the actual mixing process. The composer commented that his music was inspired by what he termed as the great energy of the movie and the gripping screenplay. The result has been a beautiful blend of visual and sound , so good that they mesh symbiotically to produce the most dramatic emotional moments in the movie. Rahman said it was important that the music score should stand on its own but is at the same time presented in a manner it does not take from the scene and to achieve that he had taken extra care to make sure the viewer enjoyed the score so as not to diminish the quality of the visual shots . He was very happy he said , to have received feedbacks from audiences which were positive all the way through. Commenting on the performance of Sri Lankan Maya Arulpragasam aka M.I.A. in the song " Paper Planes" he said she had originally been used to only do a temp track for Boyle , who liked it so much that he decided to keep her on and wanted another track also to be included in the film. Hip hop artist BlaaZe was brought on board for the track " Gangsta Blues" to generate a totally different mood in portraying scenes which included the elder sibling Salim who drifts into the Mumbai underworld after the brothers separate. Rahman was asked if he was considering doing a musical score to mark the recent horrific attacks on Mumbai. His response was that it was much more important for people to put their heads together and work out a strategy to provide proper security to peace loving citizens of the country and ensure the nation moves forward without fear of another such carnage happening in the future. http://www.indiajournal.com/pages/event.php?id=5527 -- regards, Vithur
