SpoutBlog on spout.com

It’s been just over a year since Danny Boyle’s sci fi film Sunshine came out, and it would be hard to imagine a more different film than Slumdog Millionaire, which has just premiered at both the Telluride and Toronto film festivals (and won the People’s Choice award at the latter). It’s an extremely touching love story set amidst the slums of Mumbai, and uses the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” as a catalytic backdrop.

Boyle definitely continues to mature as a filmmaker, and has somehow learned to be an excellent director of children––the performances he gets out of the young kids in both this movie and Millions are astounding. Despite his punk-rock roots, he claims to have gotten in touch with his innner hippy while shooting Slumdog in India. Read on to find out all about it, and why he might be driving a cab around London.

So, did Simon just bring the script to you one day, or were you familiar with the book?

He didn’t. They sent it, the producer sent it, and I think he sent it through my agent, and the bloody agent said it’s a film about “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” And I thought, who wants to make a film about that? And then, I saw his name was on it, and I recognized his name because, I’d never met him, but I knew him from The Full Monty.

And I’d seen a couple of his films since then that he’d written or directed. And I liked him a lot as a serious, we don’t have many of them, proper writers, in the UK, and I thought I should read it out of respect of him, and I’ll ring him up and I can sort of say, I like your work, and, it’s not for me.

Right.

Page 20, I just knew I was going to do it. And they’re always the best decisions because you don’t think about, will we be able to raise enough money, what’s it going to be like, will I be able to watch it? You just don’t think that, you kind of get a kind of common sense amnesia, you know? It just disappears, common sense, and then you just go, “Oh yeah, I’ll do that! It’s amazing!” and you set off and do it. And when it happens, it’s like, it’s the best way. You don’t get it every time.

They’re usually more complicated than that, but when that enters you, it’s just like, just go, you know? And we raised a bit of money. We made it for a fairly minimal price, and that sets you free as well, because I have a good relationship with Pathe in the UK, and Warner Independent were very keen to start a relationship, and all those kinds of things, so it looked perfect at first.

You know, the Warner Independent thing got more complicated once we’d finished shooting. But, they certainly gave us a huge, both, everybody gave us a huge amount of support filming, and they let us get on with it and make it how we wanted to make it. So, it was ideal, really, in a way.

How long ago was that, when you first read the script to us seeing it now here at Toronto?

The producer said it was two years ago when I first started work, when I first read it.

But, I felt like we made, I mean, we shot the film November/December/January, and we’re here now in September, so it felt pretty quick. And I wanted it to feel quick because the previous film I made, Sunshine,had taken forever. It was a studio movie, and it’s a very disciplined, isolated experience. And you want a contrast with that, you go to Mumbai.

I remember, I spoke to you at the L.A. press day for “Sunshine,” and you were sort of teasing “Slumdog,” you were saying, this is my next project and it’s kind of, I think you gave like a simple logline, I don’t think you mentioned the “Millionaire” thing, I mean, the TV show. It’s amazing to me that that’s come together so, sort of quickly. It seems like we were just, like Sunshine just came out, and then, now here we are with Slumdog Millionaire, which couldn’t be a more different film, I think.

I wanted it, we were aiming for Toronto, as well, so we kept the same speed in post that we’d had in filming, like sort of no-nonsense, get on with it, and kind of don’t indulge yourself, or… It’s a good discipline, you know, because I mean, there might be rough edges, but it kind of suits the spirit of the film.

India, I mean, Mumbai changes every day, I mean, every day. So, you’re not going to be, you’re never going to quite get it, so you might as well just get on with it, do it. It’s a really interesting place like that. Anyway, we made Toronto just. We just got it ready in time.

Yeah, at the opening night you were saying you had screened at Telluride, but then made some changes in the meantime, so we’re seeing the finished product.

So, it’s brilliant to have done it like that, and we’ve had a bit of a roller coaster ride because we thought, I mean, not but four, six weeks ago, we were dead, really, in terms of North America because of the problems with Warner Independent. But, it’s amazing the way these things work out, and they had the good grace to show it to Fox Searchlight who jumped at it. And then, we had these two festivals so that we set up, and you get a kind of response from the audience that is your dream, really, for this kind of film. So, yeah, it’s been very lucky, really.

I think, it would’ve been so easy to… well, we see documentaries and other films set in India that sort of focus on the squalor and say, my, how unfortunate this is. Aren’t these people living in such terrible conditions? Your film still shows those conditions, but it doesn’t feel… you don’t feel sad.

They don’t feel like that. They’re happy like that. It’s their home! How dare you come and say about it, “That’s not good enough.” They’re very proud, and very industrious people. They’re all working. They’re all trying to get their kids in school, if they can afford it, fairly basic school, but school. You know, very wonderful people, really. I just tried to tell it from their perspective.

And poverty is a very changeable expression. What is… Is it a poverty of kind of bricks and mortar, and there’s a poverty of the soul, and there’s a lot going on in India that you kind of like, you learn about yourself and about our society that we’ve got a lot to learn from it still, even though apparently they’re learning from us in terms of economics and in terms of development and that kind of thing, but it doesn’t bring you everything, as we know. So, you try and tell it from their perspective.

I had an amazing experience with this guy who, in this slum, the Dharavi slum, which is, Dharavi is, it’s known as the biggest slum in the world. There’s two million people living in it. It’s a city, it’s its own city. It hasn’t got a transport system other than your feet, but it’s actually a city. It’s an extraordinary place.

And we went in this one place, and this guy… It was like this, it was this size, full of vegetable oil cans, square vegetable oil cans, that big, and he’s recycling them. They recycled in India way before we got into recycling. They’ve been doing it for donkeys’ years. It’s part of the culture that people throw their rubbish away, and you think, oh, that’s disgusting, but they throw it away because there’s these people who live their lives picking it up and recycling it. There’s this pattern that you begin to see about the way, what looks like dirt to begin with, there’s actually a pattern.

Anyway, this guy, I went in, and visually, it was just, oh! I thought, please let us film here, and he said, I won’t let you film here. He said, you can look around, he said, but I’ve let National Geographic in here twice to take photographs for the magazine, and each time, I’ve asked them, please don’t say that we’re poor. And he said, each time, they just present us as being poor.

He said, I’ve run this business for 30 years. I employ like between 25 and 50 people, depending on, you know, and I give them a good wage, and they kind of like, and he said, I don’t want to be told that I’m poor. And you’ve got to take that on board, you know, when you want to make a film there, I think. And then, you know, obviously you saw that it’s pretty brutal, some of it, which it is, you don’t try and hide that because that stuff still goes on.

The children that you cast, especially the very young ones, I mean, the film stays with them a lot longer than I think other films would. A lot of times you see children in the opening scenes, and then there’s the flash cut, and the train goes by, and suddenly they’re an adult, you know?

That’s the studio, of course. That’s the pressure the studio, studio will always go… they want to get to the crumpet, the ones the people are going to identify with or desire or everything like that. No, I mean, we had, we were absolutely clear where we did that. And the kids were great. They were really, you could tell they would be fantastic when we met them.

How did you find them, just a long casting process?

Long casting process, had a great casting director there called Loveleen Tandan, and she became the co-director on the film because I had her there every day, and I kind of relied on her enormously to make sure I didn’t make any big mistakes, and obviously, translation for the kids. And translation of the text because obviously, if you translate a line of Simon’s literally into Hindi, a seven-year-old is just going to go… So, they had to be given a line that was the equivalent in Hindi. Like a really good example of it is they say at one point, “I’m hungry.” The expression in Hindi slang that he says is, “I’ve got rats running round my tummy,” which is great, you know? [laughter]

That is a great expression.

It’s a great line. And that’s what they say, but it’s too long to put it up, and so we put up, “I’m hungry.” So, what they’re saying isn’t exactly what you’re reading, but it is the equivalent for a poor Hindi person, for the kind of slang that they use.

They were great, the kids. And, again, the fact that we had a huge, they let me take a huge amount of money meant that we could do their section of the film in Hindi, because seven-year-olds don’t speak English. They start learning it at about seven. They pick it up from all sorts of places. Television, movies, music. Lot of music in there that they’re picking up English from. That kind of the whole cultural history of Britain and English within India.

So, they’re picking it up gradually. So, we made the transition between seven and 14. By the time they’re 14, they can speak English. And because we wanted it to be a mainstream movie, they do. They’re going to speak English from there on.

Don’t they have a name for that genre? The Hinglish film?

Hinglish, yeah.

They kind of blend it together.

They do blend it together and it’s a living language there. They’re really, it’s developing and evolving the whole time. Strange words. They’re an odd mix too, you know.

I love how you featured the phone centers because there’s a novel called “Transmission” by this Indian author named Hari Kunzru. It focuses on - one of the characters is an employee of one of these phone centers - and it talks about how they physically train them to speak in different dialects. To know the general geography so they can sound like, “Oh no, I live in your town.”

Casual kind of references to things. They learn. They have this briefing session at the beginning of the day where they get the sports results from America from the night before. [laughs] So that if they’re caught they can fall back on it. It’s just bizarre.

Had you ever been to India before?

No, I hadn’t actually. My dad was there in the war. He served as a young man training. He went to Bombay with tens of thousands of other British guys to invade Japan. They were going to invade Japan. They were getting ready to invade Japan to sail off and presumably die, a great deal of them, if that happened.

He was there when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And it’s weird, he would say we knew then. He didn’t talk about it very much, but he said he knew then we weren’t going to die, we were going to go home. And he said a couple of weeks later we just sailed home. That was it, it was over,

It’s amazing. The thing he did talk about a lot was India and being in Bombay. Because the kind of casual racism in Britain that was on our televisions in the 1960s and 1970s to do with the Indian population that was moving to Britain. It used to make him so mad, because he’d say Indians are really clean, you know. Don’t believe that. But, it would make him really annoyed. I remember he’d watch this stuff on the television, he’d be really annoyed. He said, “They take a pan of water. They wash themselves when they go to the loo. Not like us, using paper.” He said they’re much cleaner. It was sort of amazing, you know. Anyway.

The Amitabh Bachchan character, is that a real Indian movie star?

Oh, he’s massive. He’s the most, apart from Gandhi, he’s probably the most famous name in India. And he’s a magnificent actor. He has starred in hundreds of films, hundreds. So, when you mention his name it is like mentioning… It’s very difficult to find an equivalent in the West. There isn’t one. You’d have to put together Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise and Michael Phelps. You’d have to put them together and say it’s that level of royalty. Absolute royalty. He’s a God to people. Outside his house in Bombay, people wait for days and days and days to catch a glimpse of him as he leaves.

Would he visit the slums like that? I mean, was that him sort of being gracious and signing autographs for the poor people in the slums or was that a created incident?

No, he has to travel everywhere by helicopter and stuff like that. And there is a little, this slum… Slums grow up around the airports and this airport he’ll have used many times. And I guess they may have run over there like that without discussing the scene we used.

Did you learn anything about yourself making this film? I mean, being in India the whole time. What did you learn?

Yes. I think, that’s the most important thing you do learn. Is that you go there and you think you’re going to learn about Indian culture and all those kinds of things. And you do obviously because you do research to make sure it’s accurate and all that kind of stuff.

The biggest thing is that hippy thing they tell you that you’re going to learn something about yourself and you do and you learn. You learn that you cannot control everything. And it’s this destiny thing of course. But, in the West, we don’t really value, because we believe we can change our destiny by hard work, by application, by all these kind of things.

But there, it’s so vast and you’re so small, you’re so meaningless. You learn your place, really. That you have a place and that you have a role. It’s very interesting and it’s a humbling thing. Because your role might be as a film director or it might be as a barber. But, you learn a kind of acceptance really that in the great scheme of things, there’s you and you’re there and you’ve got to learn. And there’s great value in learning that.

And it helps you make the film, because it learns you to respect the place you’re in. And when you do that, you’re not trying to change it. You’re not trying to control it, make it… You’re opening yourself to it. And when you do that, this terrible hippy thing happens where it comes back to you and serendipity takes place. These things fall into your lap, these gifts.

Like we got this guy, this composer, the most amazing composer, Rama. In a million years, we wouldn’t have got him because he’s like so busy in Bollywood. We got him, you know? And we find this guy Dev in London. I was running out of guys to find. I couldn’t find him in Bollywood, they were all the wrong types of guys. And my daughter says you should watch this program on British television called “Skins.” And you look, “My God, oh there he is.”

I don’t want to sound like a hippy because I’m not a hippy. I was a punk. I was like anti-hippy.

Well, that’s what you said, it was a terrible hippy thing because you’re like, “Oh, I’m embracing it, but I didn’t want to.”

I know. And I never thought, you know, I never thought I’d speak like that, but it’s true. It happens to you. It is mysterious and you can’t quite put it into words, but you sense it so strongly there. And I love the place, actually. For all its faults, and its biggest fault I think is not the dirt and the fact that there’s no toilets and all that kind of stuff. The biggest problem with it is there’s sexism. It’s not in the film because it’s not relevant to our story, but it’s a terrible place for women in many ways.

The role of women. There’s huge advances they’ve got to make there still. But, I did, despite all that, I love the place.

If tomorrow someone came and said, “Danny, you can no longer make films,” what would you do?

I’d be a… I’ve always wanted to be a taxi driver. You know, around London.

Wow.

I’ve always fancied that. I mean, when I was a kid I wanted to be a train driver. Because from my kind of background that was like what you aspired to. To be a train driver was a big thing, so you never thought you’d be a film director. But, I’ve often thought about cabbying. And sometimes when you’re working and you’re, “I think that’d be really interesting to do that.” I’d love to do that.

I mean, I’d love to be able to do something more useful with my life like be a medical technician for Médecins Sans Frontières or the Red Cross or… You know, I went to Uzbekistan with MSF actually a couple of years ago to write a report for them on - they were tackling multi drug resistant TB there - and write about it in the British Press. I’d love to do something useful with my life, but I’ve wasted myself on these bloody films.

Well, yeah. You could ostensibly be a taxi driver tomorrow. To become a medical technician you’d have to go to school for several years.

Yes, I know. But, taxi driver, you could do it. And I’ve always thought I should do that. I should just do it and it would be really interesting what you saw. Because I live in a really interesting area of London. I live in the East End of London where the Olympics are going to be, and it’s a Bengali area now. 60% Bengali population.

And there’s a lot of drugs. A lot of the drugs that come into London are coming in through there. They’re a great trading people, Bengali people, and one of the trades is drugs. I think, you’d find out a lot about all that. So, I think, that’d be really interesting. So, I’ve often thought I should do it and then make a film about it.

Yeah, I was just thinking it sounds like a film.

You do it for a year and then you could kind of like make something of it. Because you’d find out so much. I remember going out, we lost this cat. My daughter’s favorite cat disappeared. You know they vanish. And we’d end up, me and her mom would end up going out at three, four o’clock in the morning around the back streets shouting “Jenny, Jenny,” looking for this cat. And you’d see the guys going around in these unmarked cars, the drug squad.

Because they were kind of, they were police, you could tell. Because they’d come up to us and they’d realize you’re some weird couple looking for a cat, and they’re just like… But, they’re looking for these young Bengali kids kind of trading drugs and doing deals and stuff like that.

Wow. Danny Boyle, director, punk, hippy, taxi driver, I like it. [laughter]