Danny Boyle goes to India for “Slumdog Millionaire”
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
India inspires Danny Boyle
British director Danny Boyle had never been to India and wasn’t interested in making a movie about the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” But somehow he ended up doing both with his new film “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Maybe it was destiny.
“My agent sent this script, and … in a slightly dismissive way, he said, ‘It’s about “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”‘ He never mentioned it was India or anything. And I wasn’t even gonna read it because I thought, ‘I don’t want to do a film about “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” I really don’t. And I’m sure nobody wants to go and watch a film about “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,”‘” Boyle said in a recent phone interview from a publicity stop in Dallas.
“But I noticed the name on the script was this guy Simon Beaufoy, who’d written ‘The Full Monty,’ one of my favorite films. … This is genuine; it sounds like such a PR story this, but it’s true. I thought, I’ll read some of it, because then what you do is then you reply to people and you imply you’ve read the whole thing. And you very respectfully say, ‘It’s not for me.’
“And I started reading and I was like after 10, 15 pages, I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to be doing this film, I can tell you that.’ Really.”
The award-winning film, which is expected to be an Oscar contender, follows Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a poor teen from Mumbai one question away from winning big on India’s version of the game show. Suspected of cheating, he is arrested and grilled by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) who learns that Jamal’s success is fatefully tied to the youth’s troubled past and quest for true love.
“The portrayal I think of this city was so dynamic … and then of course it’s such a terrific story set within this city,” Boyle said. “It’s got an amazing central character who hijacks this … glitzy, glamorous game show that offers the world everything for his own purposes.”
Boyle, whose films include “Trainspotting,” “Millions” and “Sunshine,” makes it a habit to take on a different genre or challenge with each new project. For this film, the newness started with the Englishman making his first trip to India, where he learned why Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is called “Maximum City.”
“There are people everywhere. There just are. And they’re all busy, and they’ve all got a story to tell. … They kind of feel like living life fully all the time.”
The director who briefly shut down London’s Piccadilly Circus for “28 Days Later” and transported a full Western crew to Thailand for “The Beach” had to apply a different approach in Mumbai. He used digital cameras and took just 10 crew members with him, hiring the rest from Bollywood film crews.
“It’s not a city that you can control or organize or change in the way that a director normally works. … You have to kind of go with the flow of the city. So there’s lots of continuity mistakes in it, there’s lots of people looking in the camera, there’s lots of things that normally are the things you spend your day erasing. But there you can’t,” he said with a laugh.
The film also gave Boyle the new experience of staging a Bollywood-style dance sequence.
“It’s such a part of life there, it’s like it would look fake if you didn’t have … it in there,” he said with a laugh. “You gotta have it.”
Honored “Slumdog”
Danny Boyle’s film “Slumdog Millionaire” has earned several awards and nominations and is expected to contend for Oscar glory.
It is nominated for four Golden Globes: best motion picture-drama, best director, best original film score (A.R. Rahman) and best film screenplay (Simon Beaufoy).
It has won three British Independent Film Awards: best film, best director and most promising newcomer (Dev Patel). It also has earned acclaim from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle and Alliance of Women Film Journalists.
The film captured audience awards at the Austin Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Internet Movie Database users already have voted it onto the site’s list of the top 250 films of all time.
-BAM
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Is this the same guy who directed “28 Days Later?” Because if so, then wow is he eclectic.