Director Danny Boyle's Hoping To Win Big At The Oscars With "Slumdog Millionaire"

By Brad Balfour

Director Danny Boyle is one of those filmmakers (much like iconic director Martin Scorsese) who makes movies that generate a buzz - just because his name is attached to it - regardless of its stellar cast.

Ever since the 52-year-old Boyle made "Trainspotting," a story of a group of shambling Scottish drug addicts, his kinetic, crazy-quilt visual style combined with an ever-twisting storyline has a defined a sort of contemporary filmcraft.

That approach was employed with subsequent films like his hyper zombie thriller, "28 Days Later," the sweet-hearted "Millions" and the dark apocalyptic sci-fi tale, "Sunshine."

Now with "Slumdog Millionaire," Boyle has not only has applied his signature visual and storytelling attack to a classic rags-to-riches teen tale but has located it in one of the most crazy-qulit locations of all time, the Indian mega-city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay).

And at a time when grappling with the clash between local culture and the new globalism is a necessity, a film like "Slumdog Millionaire" comes in handy as an aid to understanding a 21st century world.

Born in Radcliffe, Lancashire (now Greater Manchester) into a working-class Irish Catholic family. Boyle's mother was from Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, and his father was from an Irish family living in England.

Boyle once seriously contemplated priesthood and attended religious school as a teenager but was discouraged by a priest from joining the clergy.

Boyle later said that he didn't know if the priest was trying to save him or the priesthood. Maybe he noticed Boyle's crazy style early on - a style first applied to the theater and then filmmaking.

With the help of a full Indian crew, Boyle tells the tale of slumdog teen Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) who becomes a contestant on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to be A Millionaire?" - something he does in an effort to find his true love, Latika, who is both a high class whore and an ardent fan of the show.

With Oscar-talk buzzing in the background (the film won the People's Choice award at this year's Toronto Film Festival), Boyle talked with a small set of writers in anticipation of the film's release.

Q: As a stranger to India, how was it making a film that's a portrait of this incredible country?
Danny Boyle (DB): You obviously feel a lot of responsibility. You worry about yourself as a westerner. I didn't want to make a film where westerners go around India, or anything like that. But still, you are a westerner.
I just wanted to make it distinctively and subjectively as possible, so you felt like you were looking at it from the inside. One of the dangers of India is that it has that "wow" factor where you go, "Look at that!"
It feels like you're using it as some kind of thing to just stare at, and they hate that. We did these film tests at the beginning, and it was a bit like that. There's a danger with cameramen. For a cameraman to shoot in India is a dream come true.
Photographically, it's the place for coffee table books. So it is a danger for cinematographers, because they go, "Wow! The colors!" I didn't want that. I wanted to be hurtled into it.
I love action movies, even the bad ones, because there's something about why films are called "motion pictures." It's where it all began when our ancestors sat there and saw motion, moving. And I really believe that about films. There's a kineticism about them that's wonderful; they shouldn't always be a reflective medium. It doesn't suit reflection.
I remember meeting [actor] Tim Robbins. I was trying to get him to play this part in a film. It was a really good part but he said he wouldn't do it. I said, "I can't understand why you won't do it."
He said, "Because he dies at the end." I said, "What?" He said,
"Nobody remembers anyone who has died." And it's true.
You just move forward; it's all about forward motion. And I tried to bring that to it, really. Bombay feels like it's living in fast-forward anyway.

Q: So then how did you, Danny Boyle, come to do "Slumdog Millionaire?"
DB: They sent a script. The agent said it's a film about "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And I said, "What?!"
My agent wants me to do American films. He's always trying to get me to do a film here, but I never do. And then I saw screenwriter Simon [Beaufoy]'s name on it. I'd never met him, but I thought, "I'd better read at least five pages of it. "
As soon as I read 10 pages of it... You know when you're going to do something. I doesn't always happen, but sometimes you just know. And you shouldn't wait until you get to the end, because when you get to the end all the realities of filmmaking kick in: how will we cast?
Will we be able to raise enough money? Who will distribute it? All that.

Q: Your films are known for their kinetic charge, for the frenetic editing and the wonderful shots that you get. When you read the script, did that start bubbling up right away? Is that what you see? Do you have a vision?
DB: It's very difficult to describe; it sort of vibrates. There's a great screenwriter named David Benioff - I read this screenplay he wrote the other day; it's excellent. A piece of skilled screenwriting, and yet you don't feel that vibration yourself, personally about doing it.
And probably, the stuff you do is probably not technically as good as this screenplay. But for some reason it vibrates.
I remember with "Trainspotting," when I read the book [by Irvine Welsh] - I can virtually quote it verbatim - I remember reading that first page and thinking: "we're going to make this." And that's just one page. I remember thinking that. You have these instincts. I remember meeting Freida [Pinto, who play the adult version of Jamal's love, Latika] for this and thinking, "I bet that's her."
You don't get that for everybody or everything, but when you do get it, it comes naturally. It just pops. You should always follow that instinct because there's something there you don't really understand fully, and that's a good thing. 'Cause you'll find out about it when you're making it. It's funny like that; I can't explain it anymore than that - that's the truth. It's not more complex than that, or more cunning than that or anything.

Q: I was amazed to see how you applied your style to this film. At first I didn't see how it made sense; then it did. When did you know you could apply the Danny Boyle style to this movie? How did you figure out how it worked?
DB: A lot of it's the script. Beaufoy did an amazing job. The book is rigid. The book is like 12 chapters, 14 chapters, and each chapter is a question and answer - and it's like a series of short stories. It would never have worked as a film like that. What Simon did was this very clever thing where he fed the material in early, so sometimes you got the answers way before even the question was asked.
Sometimes you didn't; you had to wait. And it makes you feel very intelligent - it made me feel intelligent, and I always love that [laughs].
You feel it, and you start to see it. We went as soon as we were there and walked through areas of Bombay. There's nothing to look at, really. There's no architecture, just people. And you've got to like people, and I do like people a lot. If you like that, you've got plenty of them. A billion people live there, and that enough for a plant, never mind quite a small country, really. That's where you get your energy from.

Q: You had the great makings of a documentary with the wild scenarios and experiences that came from this.
DB: There's a guy who shot the whole time, and they say it's very good. I haven't seen it yet, but they're getting it ready for the DVD.
There are so many stories, and yet what matters, more than anything, is your attitude. You have to go in with the right attitude. You can't control it.
Directors are really about control, and that's one of the things you try to do all of the time: control experience, capture it. And you can't do that there. It's like trying to stop the sea; forget it.
You've just got to plunge in and go with it. And it's a lot of risk taking. You're not certain that you've got stuff - you have to wait till you get back. Actually, you've got a much greater result than you thought you had.

Q: Co-director Loveleen - what was that about?
DB: She was the casting director, Loveleen Tandan, who did an amazing job. It was quite a big cast, and I didn't know anybody, virtually no one. And I realized that I needed her on the set. She wants to be a director as well, and she can do it, you can tell. It wasn't just for the kids - who only spoke Hindi - it was for everything, really. And I could test things against her, culturally, and stuff like that.
When I knew I wanted to make a mistake, do something incorrect, because you do do that - films have their own logic which isn't applicable to the country necessarily. Then I sent her off to do the second unit.
The second unit had been shooting very badly, and then I realized, I should send her out with it... As soon as I sent her out with it, the stuff that came back was like fantastic. So we called her "co-director" because she deserves it. [She] and the first assistant director, this guy called Raj Acharya, and the guy that did the live sound, Resul Pookutty - they were very special for the film.

Q: What did you do to balance the grim moments with the happier parts?
DB: It's very difficult to answer that question because you don't think about things like that till you talk to journalists. Then journalists come up with things like that; then they come up with things that connect films. But you don't think like that when you're making them. Well, I don't anyway. I don't think, "This bit's so tough. How's it ever going to fit with the happier here." You try to make each bit as intense an experience as possible. And if they don't go together, you'll probably never see the film.

Q: There's an intuitive sense of what's balanced?
DB: Yeah, and I think a writer writes like that intuitively as well. You also, for me anyway, you love variation; and that suits India because there are such extremes. And I love that sense of hitting a different note in a film. That's one of the reasons I love music in film because you can often have a tone of a film that's just similar or too flat, and you can pop it with music. And it just suddenly feels like a different film. It's one of the wonderful ways music works.
There's lots of ways you can work on it, but without intellectualizing it. It's weird doing these kinds of conversation because you become aware of things like that. I always worry about doing things like that because you can carry these conversations over the next film. But you don't; you have a kind of amnesia. It's weird--you also have amnesia about the realities of filmmaking, about how difficult it is sometimes. You never consider that. You think: that's great! Let's do this.

(Read Part Two of Brad's interview with Danny Boyle in next week's Irish Examiner)