Slumdog Millionaire- a low-budget film about an Indian boy's experience on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?- has been honoured at festivals all over the world and is tipped for a Best Picture Oscar. Director Danny Boyle can't believe the hype, he tells Michael Dwyer
EVERY AWARDS season seems to produce the "little film that could", the unheralded low-budget production that eclipses expensive, heavily touted star vehicles.
Come Oscar night, those outsiders generally get rewarded with a screenplay prize, as was the case in recent years with Juno, Little Miss Sunshineand Sideways. By then, however, they have boosted the careers of their creative talent and made substantial profits at the box office.
Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionairehas been on a roll since its world premiere at the Toronto festival, where it received a sustained standing ovation and outshone 250 other movies to win the audience award. It's since gone on to accumulate enough year-end awards to fill a mantelpiece or two.
"I don't know what's happening," says Boyle, visibly elated and just as passionately animated about his movie when we meet in London as when we talked in Toronto four months ago. "It's incredible. Isn't it weird to watch the way these things progress across time? A few weeks before Toronto, we were nowhere, and then suddenly it took off and hasn't stopped.
"I'm intrigued with this Indian concept of destiny. I understand now, having spent time there making this film, why they believe in it. I'd be hard-pushed to rationally explain how this film has become what it is now. People in India would explain it simply by saying that's destiny."
Boyle was shocked by the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. "I was very relieved after we checked with all our Indian cast and crew and they weren't harmed," he says. "The coverage here concentrated on the British and Americans in the hotels, but the imagery that disturbed me was from VT station. We shot for weeks in that station. Many Indian people were massacred there - people from every faith, creed and caste. It was co-ordinated. If you open up with a machine gun there, you just want to kill indiscriminately. It's nothing to do with sending a warning to the west."
His film opens in Mumbai in 2006, when 18-year-old Jamal is one question away from winning the jackpot of 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Suspicions are raised by the uneducated young man's impoverished background. As the investigation proceeds, Jamal explains how he learned each answer through his experiences while living on the streets with his brother, as outlined in flashbacks.
This hard-edged but vibrant and affecting tale is assembled with social concern, emotional depth and an infectious energy by Boyle, at the peak of his form, and propelled by an exuberant soundtrack all the way to a rousing finale.
Even though a fifth of the dialogue is in Hindi (and subtitled in English), the Oscar buzz on the film is so strong that many believe it could go the distance and take the award for Best Picture. Boyle is wary.
"You've got to be careful because the history is that in the end, the town tends to vote for itself," he says. "The truth is that being under so much discussion now is the real benefit. If we can get a nomination, it doubles the benefit. In America people make a point of seeing the films talked about for Oscars, so that they can share their opinions on them. They watch movies the way I watch football. I can talk about every team in the Premiership, and they do that about movies."
We have come to expect the unexpected from Boyle, who defies typecasting as a director, comfortably crossing between genres in movies as diverse as Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Laterand Sunshine.
"I always used to envy actors who could move from doing a historical film to a thriller to a sports film," he says. "I like being able to move around like that, so that people won't know what's going to come next. It's bound to make it more interesting for you, isn't it? You spend a few years researching space for Sunshine, and then you get a year in India."
The screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire is by Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty, and is based on the novel Q A by Indian author Vikas Swarup.
"When they sent me the script, I thought there's no way I'd be interested in making a movie about a game show," Boyle says. "As an ordinary person, I was totally addicted to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? long before this film ever came up. Of course, now that I've made the film, I really appreciate the show's very clever device, which has a real universality about it. It has a penetration across so many cultures. It's even in Afghanistan now. It just started there.
"The production values are so effective - the lighting, the music. Having directed a version of the show for the film, I had to learn every detail of it. The music is extraordinary. If you pick the wrong moment to interrupt the music, everything feels wrong. The music gets this heartbeat going and it can go on and on. The only way they ever stop it is when they take it out under the applause and you don't notice that it's going."
In the film, the presenter of the TV show is smugly patronising, rather like Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge.
"He's full on, isn't he?" Boyle remarks. "The show has had two presenters in India. The first, Amitabh Bachchan, was hugely respected, but the guy who took over from him, Shah Rukh Khan, is the biggest star in Bollywood right now. I think some of Anil Kapoor's performance as the presenter is a little mickey-taking of Khan."
Boyle was fascinated to learn that when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? premiered on Indian TV, highly educated people would apply, pretending to be poor.
"The prize money is phenomenal by Indian standards of living. It's worth around £400,000, and that's a princely sum in India. I was told that that's why some of the questions in the show are some of the most difficult in the world. In Britain you tend not to get professors of humanities at Oxford going on the show. Their equivalents in India would have no problem doing it."
As an outsider who had never been to India before the film, Boyle was apprehensive about shooting there. "You're making omelettes in someone else's kitchen," is how he puts it.
"I tried to make it with people there who I really valued, and I made a lot of friends there who helped me and to whom I'm eternally grateful. Everybody warned me about how difficult it would be, but I felt that it would terrible if I went in with that attitude. I decided to go in and embrace all this chaos and see if we could set our narrative in it.
"If you look at the film for things such as continuity, it's not there. You can do continuity in Mumbai if you want to spend half the budget chasing it, and you'll get it eventually, but it will look crap. It won't look like the city because the city isn't about continuity. It's about change, constant change, and yet, completely contradictorily, it remains exactly the same. It's like the ocean, always changing but always the ocean.
"You've got to get your head around these ideas that are bigger than the usual things you work on. It informs things like coincidence. Some people say it's too much of a coincidence that Jamal gets asked all these questions he knows. But the point of coincidence is completely irrelevant in Mumbai. Coincidence is part of life there and they celebrate it when they find it. I loved that about the place. I found it revitalising.
"What we do in the West, and it's part of development obviously, is that we shave the edges off life. We health-and-safety away things and we politically correct things."
In another series of coincidences, Dev Patel, who plays Jamal as an 18-year-old, had no acting experience when he did his first audition and secured a recurring role in the Channel 4 series, Skins. It was Boyle's daughter Caitlin, a fan of that series, who recommended Patel for Slumdog Millionaire. That was Patel's first audition for a movie and he got the leading role.
"And now he's getting nominated for awards," Boyle says. "That's just too much of a coincidence. Who would think that would ever happen? Sorry, but it did."
To remain as inconspicuous as possible while filming in Mumbai, Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle used a light, portable digital system.
"You can't tell the difference between it and film, except you can operate it with such ease because it's so compact. You can do anything with it. That was essential to capture the dynamism of the city. And if the local population sees a big film camera, they think a movie star is going to turn up soon and they'll hang around for ages."
Boyle says he's now "a devotee" of India. "I loved being there. Not everybody does because it's quite tough, but if you get to embrace it, it's remarkable what it does to you. What you can learn about the human spirit, about human suffering, endurance, optimism, all those things, is just phenomenal. There is an intensity of experience and a sense of life lived to the absolute maximum. I'm not talking about excessive drinking or anything like that, but a sense of life in its essence lived.
"A lot of Westerners go to India and they don't understand. They find all the begging frustrating and revolting. There are extremes of wealth and poverty, but the society does not divide those extremes like we do. They exist side by side, openly, visibly, shockingly, and they're inter-connected. Their idea of destiny actually combines them because they believe that they're all in this together.
"Just because one person may have very good fortune and another doesn't, that doesn't separate them. They're all responsible for each other. And it's not like a PR exercise, like rich actors giving to charity."
Slumdog Millionaireopens next Friday
Trainspotting: will there ever be a sequel?
The heightened energy levels of Slumdog Millionaireevoke the infectious pulsating rhythm of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting(1996), adapted by John Hodge from Irvine Welsh's novel. Since Welsh revisited its characters in Porno (2002), there has been talk of a movie sequel to Trainspotting.
"It's still gestating," Boyle says. "I think it will happen and I really want to do it. The idea is very strong. John has already done the screenplay, a very loose first draft to see if it can work, and I think it will. It won't be like the first one, which is what's stimulating for me about it, although I know that will be frustrating for other people. Some people expect sequels to be basically Xeroxes of the original film, but we don't want to do that.
"This one will be very different, which will be as exciting for the actors as it will be for us. When they're old enough, we'll be ready for them. It's very rare that you get a chance to get six actors firing on all cylinders like that. We would want to do that again, but in a very different way because they'll all be in middle age and they can't blaze in the same way."
