Making it in Mumbai

Danny Boyle on filmmaking in India, working
with A.R. Rahman and his vivid new adventure
story, Slumdog Millionaire

DARING TO BE DIFFERENT: Boyle

by MARK SLUTSKY

Danny Boyle has never been afraid of creative self-re-invention. After making perhaps the quintessentially iconic ’90s movie with Trainspotting, Boyle would dabble in dark romantic comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), exotic-set action-adventure (The Beach), zombie horror (28 Days Later) and straight sci-fi (Sunshine). Consistency? Not his strong suit, clearly. But Boyle’s willingness to take risks, to not settle into a comfortable style, rhythm or subject matter throughout his career, means that he’s capable of surprising you with every new picture, something that can’t be said of many directors.

Boyle’s latest is one of those pleasant surprises—and it might even be his best film so far. Like all his best work, it’s completely unlike anything he’s done before. Set in Mumbai, Slumdog Millionaire tells the twisting tale of street kid Jamal Malik, played at various ages by different actors but mainly by Dev Patel. As the film opens, Jamal is enjoying a record-breaking run on, of all things, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Suspected of fraud, he’s brought into custody by the police, who question him about his unusual success; their interrogation is the framing device for the film, as Jamal illustrates how he was able to answer the questions on the game show by relating episodes from his young life: his beggar upbringing and the pursuit of his lost love.

Slumdog Millionaire has the feel of an epic yarn, a shaggy-dog story with echoes of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. At the same time, it’s very much of the now: a colourful portrait of a changing country where slums can become condos overnight, but where the cycle of poverty never seems to change. It’s exuberant, and joyous, an old-fashioned rags-to-riches romance, but tinged just slightly with sadness and loss (and the recent attacks in Mumbai only add to that shading).

Speaking to the Mirror on the phone from a publicity stop in Chicago, Boyle talks passionately about making movies, laughing frequently, and you get the sense that his unflagging enthusiasm has something to do with his constantly changing directorial identity.

Mirror: Slumdog really made its name on the festival circuit. Is there something about the movie that makes it so fest-friendly?

Danny Boyle: I think it’s certainly a journey film, which film festivals love. It’s warm, as well, ultimately, although it’s pretty tough early on. It’s ultimately a warm, generous film. I think audiences respond to that as groups. What a festival does is give you a focus group of people, which you won’t necessarily get otherwise. People are not necessarily going to see it in full theatres and the communal experience of watching it clearly benefits the film. You get an extra buzz from having seen it together. Especially as a “discovery film” in many ways, certainly in terms of a North American audience, discovering Indian culture, something which could be very strange and normally portrayed in a way that’s not that accessible to a mainstream audience.

M: As a filmmaker, was it a discovery film for you to make as well?

DB: Oh God, yeah. I mean, big time. It’s one of the reasons that made me really, really want to do it. I’d spent about three years making this sci-film film, Sunshine, a studio film, completely locked inside a cold environment, space, and all the technicalities of that, very precise. And suddenly you get a chance to do a film in India, in Mumbai, which is not incorrectly called a “maximum city.”

CHASING CHANGE

M: It must have been something to go from that completely controlled soundstage environment to urban India, one of the most uncontrollable environments in the world.

DB: That’s it in a nutshell, in an absolute nutshell. People often say to me that I do things so differently from film to film. I realize I do that deliberately, and it’s hugely to try and go back to the beginning again. To get back to that freshness you have when you’ve just made your first film. It’s a bit alarming as well, you don’t know what you’re doing, but there’s something about that that gives you a real opportunity to make a thing freshly-minted.

You never quite get it back again, and that’s why I always think your first film is your best film, personally. Although you may have technical achievements after that, more popular films or whatever, but your first one is your best one in a funny kind of way. And you always should be trying to get back to that level of innocence and not trying to cheat things just because you know how to.

Normally, I try and change to encourage that, but this change, I was aware that it was more all-encompassing than anything I’d ever done before. How to work there is completely different: if you want to rely on your old tricks, you wouldn’t be able to because it calls on you to be a very different filmmaker. You have to submerge yourself in the place. You can’t control it, you can’t operate it, you can’t impose anything on it. I mean, you can try, but you’ll fail and also you’ll waste your film’s budget trying to do it. You’ve just got to go with it, really.

That helped me because, obviously, as a foreigner, I wanted to try and be inside the place as much as possible. You realize very quickly that’s the only way to make the film. It’s not an exclusive city, it’s a completely inclusive society, but if you don’t choose to include yourself, you’ll get nowhere.

M: The movie really has an old-fashioned feel to it: like Robert Louis Stevenson, with game show winnings instead of pirate booty.

DB: It’s obvious, isn’t it? Everybody’s said it—it’s Dickens, really in so many ways. The writer knew it was Dickens as well. He could feel it. It’s got those extremes of storytelling—the melodrama, and the ceaseless city. The city, just throwing up characters and situations. So it is very Dickensian. And it’s adventure storytelling, isn’t it? Like you say, Robert Louis Stevenson.

GAME ON: Patel

LOOKING FOR AN UNDERDOG

M: You actually found your lead, Dev Patel, in the U.K., right?

DB: Yeah. I wanted to do everything there in India, acting-wise, but I was having this problem with the main guy, because the guys there, if they want to be in movies, they have to do the “hero acting” look. That look is something I wasn’t really interested in: it’s very kind of built, like a body builder, very muscular, even in young men of 18. So you get that weird thing where their heads look too small for their bodies, because they’ve just been in the gym for six months, you know, trying to get a part! Because they’ve all got to rip their shirts off and things like that (laughs). I wanted a guy who really was an underdog. And so I started looking differently, really. And my daughter said you should watch this guy in Skins, which is this TV show in Britain, and he was very interested.

M: Can I ask about the music and working with the composer A.R. Rahman?

DB: He’s a complete and utter genius. He’s like one of the biggest-selling artists in the world! They don’t charge very much for his CDs, but every one he puts out sells like 100 million copies (laughs). And yet he’s this incredibly modest gentleman and I loved working with him. We worked together and I think it was quite exciting for him to do a movie with a Western filmmaker, and yet it was in his culture, and music there is so interesting. Because you’ve got the traditional stuff, you’ve got Bollywood, you’ve got hip hop, which is coming across, and you’ve got house music from Europe, but it’s all blending together.

M: And he synthesizes that to a certain extent.

DB: Oh yeah. I love the way music reinvents itself and kind of is a hybrid of things. I personally find that kind of stuff very exciting. I loved it. And it’s interesting, we had a song by M.I.A, and she, growing up in Sri Lanka, was devoted to Rahman. He was her hero. So we said to her, “Will you come and sing with him?” and she was over the moon! We showed her the film so she would give us “Paper Planes,” her song, to put in the movie. But then they ended up doing a track together for the film—she sang for him, which was very cool for her. It was a bit of a dream come true for her, I think!