Interview: Danny Boyle Talks “Slumdog Millionaire”

“The name of the industry is the “motion picture” industry, and I really believe that. Movies are about forward motion and there’s something incredibly positive about it. It’s a medium that moves forward always. I find that really optimistic and I try to get that spirit in the film.”

Danny Boyle has had a remarkably interesting film career, with each of his efforts differing starkly from the last. Before the AFI Film Festival screening of his latest work, Slumdog Millionaire, Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice told of how he was blown away by Shallow Grave when he first saw it, and has relentlessly pursued Boyle for projects ever since. But when it came down to a project like Alien 4, which would have made Boyle a very hefty paycheck, Rice discovered that the director he so admired just could not take on a project if his heart wasn’t in it - which just made Boyle all the more admirable.

The AFI held a tribute to Boyle’s work and gave us an interview with the man himself about his latest work and how he chose the project. This is what he had to say about the film that’s got all the Oscar pundits atwitter. He came off as an earnest artist very much concerned with authenticity and the vibrant power of films, and he makes you want to go watch all of his movies immediately.

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Q: Your last movie, Sunshine, was shot in a very confined space with ten or twelve people in a room, and now you’ve gone to a city of sixteen million people and six months working there. Was that an intentional choice? Did you feel you needed to get out of a dark room?

Boyle: Yeah, I always wanted to make a space movie, but not Alien 4. I wondered why directors never went back into space. They only ever make one space movie, and having made one I realized why, of course. It’s a very very lonely place where you make it, nd you’re extraordinary the way you look at space movies. The pressure you put directors on to get it just right for the audience is extraordinary.

I was sent a script by my agent, but he said ‘it’s a film about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. I thought ‘I don’t really want to make a film about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.’ I didn’t say anything to him, I’m too polite. But I saw the name on it was Simon Beaufoy. I knew Simon’s work from The Full Monty and I never met him but I thought I better read this a bit. You know how you do. You imply that you know a whole script and you turn it down because it’s not right for you or whatever, those excuses that you make. But after about ten pages, I was just lost in it, really. It’s an extraordinary portrait of this city and this young guy who had this agenda that you couldn’t quite understand. It has to do with this big show. I guess it’s the world’s biggest quiz show. It’s everywhere, it’s on in Afghanistan next month or something. It’s unbelievable the impact it has on the world. But he clearly had a different agenda as well as just the money. I rang him up and said ‘I want to do it. I just want to do it.’ And you make your best decisions before you even finish the script, before you get to the end. You get amnesia when you’re reading scripts about what the realities of it will be like. How will you cast it, who will raise the money, how will you distribute it, and all of that, you know? That’s the best place to make a decision. I remember reading the first page of Trainspotting, the book, and just knowing where to make a film about that book. That’s just page one. Something happens, something that you should trust, something instinctive happens to you.

Q: The book is very episodic, it doesn’t have the fluidity of time that Simon has injected in the script, and also there’s no love story. But when you’re reading the script, is it how Simon has structured time that immediately strikes you? Or is it something else that you seized upon?

Boyle: It makes you feel sort of intelligent really. I felt intelligent reading it, which you don’t often do reading scripts. Not to insult any writers here, but this made me feel super intelligent, really. I won’t tell you what that quality is, because I hope you feel the same way, intelligent and refreshed and all that. It was also the portrait of the city. Mumbai. The “maximum city” and I couldn’t wait to get there. I read this book about it called Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, and when I got there it felt like New York in the 80’s. I remember going there for the first time in my life and it was just the impression it made on me. Just extraordinary, burnt on your mind. The energy of the city. Every molecule you’re breathing in was full of the life of the city. Mumbai is like that. It’s not about architecture, it’s about the people. There’s so many people there constantly moving, constantly changing. You can’t control it. You can’t alter it or twist it. You have to give yourself over to it really. You’ll get destroyed if you try to do the colonial thing of bringing a film crew in there with the big elbows and say make way we’re coming to make a film. You have to kind of flow with the city. And so we used these digital cameras to help us have that kind of eloquence and maneuverability in the city. It helped us try and capture the energy. I believe in the energy from films, and if I can achieve that I’m very happy about it.

Q: What have you learned in making The Beach about the westerner coming to another country, and what did you do differently when you came to India to make Slumdog?

Boyle: Well we took this massive crew to Thailand, hundreds of people, and you know what film crews are like. They arrive with their per diems and go ‘where’s the pool?’ They just want to establish themselves in the country, and you are like an invading army. You just impress yourself on the country. But I realized that was not the way I wanted to make this film. So we took about ten crew from the west that we liked and the rest of the crew came from Bollywood, which had enormous experience and they make a thousand films a year. It’s a fantastic resource that we can use. They were the people who helped us make the film.

Q: Is that as much about not wanting to be perceived as an interloper but also about trying to understand the culture and trying to capture that on film. What does that result in, in terms of the finished film?

Boyle: When you think back about the film so much you think it’s a bit of a naïve idea thinking a westerner can go there and tell a story from the inside, and it is naïve in a way. The only recommendation I can make on my behalf is that an outsider can look at a city and recognize things in a city that the people take for granted.

Q: One of the big moves you made in pre-production and casting was changing the first third of the film. It was originally written in English.

Boyle: The script was originally written in English and the young kids, the slum kids don’t speak English yet and so it wasn’t really working with the script. We were auditioning very middle class kids who were highly educated. It didn’t feel right because looking at the location you could see the kids running around. Physically, they’re just wiry and agile and on the hunt for life, just looking around. The casting director, she said to us, if you want to do it properly you should translate it into Hindi. Initially, Christian the producer and Simon the writer, we just thought we can’t do that. You can imagine how that will be greeted in America at the studio. But we did try it and it came alive, really, the script. It absolutely started blazing away. I had to ring up Warner Independent and tell them that a third of the film is going to be in Hindi and we’re going to have subtitles. And they were thrilled, absolutely delighted. (laughter) They were roaring away, ‘keep going, Danny,’ they would say. Actually, there was a complete silence like they had thought I’d lost my mind. Or thought I had gone all Indian and I was trying to do a film about yoga and it’d be an endless length about meditation. I said ‘listen, it will be even more exciting because of the subtitles’ We were at a Q&A last night and a guy said ‘they’re not really subtitles they’re scattered titles.’ I’m very proud of the way that they turned out.

Q: So you’re working with an actor, Anil Kapoor, who’s doing his first English language, Freida Pinto, who has never acted before and Dev Patel, who’s never made a film before and obviously a lot of children earlier in the story. How do you work with those so many different kinds of actors to make a coherent performance?

Boyle: It’s anything to get my own way. Typical director. No, it’s an enormous body of wonderful actors and you’ll see some of them in some of them in lots of the parts tonight. The kids, they just love acting. It’s like America, India. The love of film there is palpable. It’s absolutely burned into the DNA of people there just like it is in America. You go to countries like America, India, and France is the other one where their love of film is just extraordinary, you know? So kids don’t have any hesitation with the acting. It’s all they can do bits for the movies and they’ve seen lots of films. So that was relatively easy in a way to find those people. Freida was someone that I had seen on a tape originally. We saw hundreds and hundreds of girls and I always remembered thinking ‘that was her’ the first time. It attaches on you at the back of your memory. You go through the whole process to be fair to all the actors, but I always knew we’d come back to her. I only had that experience twice before. Once with a little kid in Millions and with Kelly MacDonald in Trainspotting.

And the other guy, Dev - we were auditioning in Bollywood and we wanted to find everybody there, but most of the young guys there are very muscle bound. You know, they’re all in the gym. Your way into the industry is to look like you can get your jacket and shirt off and stand under the waterfall in the Swiss Alps and do the music number. They’re wonderful actors but they have these bodies where they can’t even put their arms down, there’s so much muscle mass under there. And also, because they’re only eighteen their heads are still quite small. That’s not right, they needed to be more vulnerable looking. My daughter said to see this guy that was in Skins the TV show in London. We saw him and he was an amazing young man. He was seventeen when we made the film. The biggest problem we had with him was getting rid of him mom, who thought he needed looking after. she was very worried about him going abroad to make a film. We did get rid of her eventually. She was a very nice woman. Dev often took control of the film; you need your actor to take control of the film. It’s amazing to see that it’s all about actors. We’re kind of stylish directors, but we all know, don’t we, that about ninety percent of it is about that relationship you have with actors on the screen.

Q: Do you think that is something that distinguishes your films rather than your imprint as a film maker? A distinct visual style that is a spirit of the performance and a spirit of the way you work with actors?

Boyle: Very much so for the vast majority of the audience. Some of us are interested in directors and industry and things like that, but for the vast majority you always gotta remember it’s about getting it right for those actors. The name of the industry is the “motion picture” industry, and I really believe that. I often think about people when they first went to see movies. They went to watch the motion, this extraordinary, mythical, magical thing of a train moving on the screen there, and it wasn’t a real train anymore but it was still moving. I feel really dedicated to that. I think movies are about forward motion and there’s something incredibly positive about it. It’s not really a reflective medium, it’s a medium that moves forward always. I find that really optimistic and I try to get that spirit in the film.

Q: Do you think working in India and making this movie changed you more as a person or as a film maker?

Boyle: It’s kind of both really. You learn such a lot by being there. I can’t tell you how transforming it is if you go in with the right attitude. We used to see these guys, these American, British, German businessmen at the airports screaming and shouting at local people about ‘this is no way to run an airport! I could run an airport better than this!’ You just knew those guys were never going to see their luggage again ever. But if they’d trusted the place, I can guarantee with my life that at the end of the day, their bag would be there with absolutely no problem at all. It’s an incredibly generous and welcoming place if you go in the right way.