British director Danny Boyle never makes calm films. He's tried a lot of things, working in genres from horror to science fiction to fantasy to thrillers to straight dramas, albeit ones with a fantastical or surreal edge. But his films—Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Millions, and more—all share an edgy, nervous, feverishly intense quality that makes them stand out. Boyle's latest, the energetic fable Slumdog Millionaire, continues the trend. It adapts Vikas Swarup's bestseller Q&A to tell the story of a 18-year-old Mumbai orphan on the brink of winning millions of rupees in India's version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?—a situation that makes the show's producers and the local police rightly suspicious. The film is essentially a fairy tale, set firmly in modern Indian, with a tinge of modern Bollywood. Shortly before the film opened, Boyle spoke with The A.V. Club about…
The A.V. Club: You co-directed Slumdog Millionaire with Loveleen Tandan, who's cast and crewed films in India, but never directed before. How did that come about?
Danny Boyle: I did five months with her beforehand, casting. It's quite a big cast, in terms of regular people, and then there's all the kids, and they have to connect with each other and make sense as growing people. So we were working together every day, pretty intensely. And the film began to be influenced by her. I could feel that—you just do—because obviously I began to talk to her about stuff that initially people probably wouldn't tell you about, stuff that she didn't think was accurate. So it became clear to me that I needed to carry that into the film with me. Not just because the little kids weren't very good at English, they were really only Hindi speakers, not just for translation reasons, but because she was beginning to influence the film.
She wants to be a director herself. It's very difficult there, I think, to start off directing, particularly as a woman. Eventually, I sent her out on a second unit, because the stuff that was coming back out of second unit wasn't very good. It needed a director there. And she did some lovely stuff with them, brought back some lovely stuff, so it felt only right to call her the co-director really, and hope that will give her a leg up in her career. There were a couple of other people as well who I couldn't credit as much as her, for technical reasons. There was the first assistant director, this guy Raj Acharya, and also the live sound guy, Resul Pookutty. They again were like Loveleen, they had a major influence on me. It would have been a quarter of a film, really, without their influence.
AVC: Was there any question about whether to film it in India, instead of on a soundstage, or locally?
DB: We went there, and the production company that was helping us do it, India Take One, most of the films they make are Bollywood films. They know what India—especially Mumbai—is like to film in. They were trying to influence me to shoot in the studios the whole time. It felt to me like the flavor of the film—the city was a character, obviously. It's a bit of a cliché to say it, but it's true. It really felt like it was. It would be like if you did a film about New York, and you did it all in a studio. There would be something apathetic about it, which might be the effect that you were after. But if you wanted a kind of realism, something that felt real and was being told from the point of view of a kid, you've got to film it in the real places. Also, just as a director, it's only by doing that you get any chance, as a Westerner, of actually being able to represent life truthfully. I couldn't fake it in a studio because I don't really know what India is like, so it just makes so much sense to do it where it belongs. It's a street film, really. It's about a kid from the streets, and so you've got to make it in the streets.
AVC: What's it like going from something that's so interior and claustrophobic and set-bound, like Sunshine, to something that's based on being outdoors among huge crowds of people?
DB: Incredibly liberating! [Laughs.] As you can probably tell from watching the film, I just went mad for it, really. I'm sure it was partly the release from coming out of a studio environment. I found it completely liberating and enjoyable. Not everybody did. We took about 10 crew members from Sunshine, and I would say three or four of them really didn't enjoy being there, but I loved it, and they had to drag me away at the end. They had to drag me back to England to edit it. [Laughs.] I loved it, and I'm sure some of it was the contrast to Sunshine. But a lot of it is also that if you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it. I loved it. I don't want to say I fell in love with it, but it obviously was a bit like that.
AVC: How much of what we see in the film is a real, raw India, vs. built sets or compositing?
DB: Oh no, no special effects or compositing.
AVC: The gigantic tin-roof slum looked created. It's a real place?
DB: Oh yeah. [Laughs.] Dharavi is a lot bigger than that. It's supposed to be the biggest slum in the world, with about two million people in it. We didn't do much CG. Most of it was the kids chasing the train, that was dangerous with kids, so we had them on wires in case anything happened, so most of our special-effects budget went to removing the wires. The Taj Mahal was CG, because they won't light up the Taj at night. So you have to photograph it in the daytime, and the computer turns it into a night shot, and then you film a night scene and you put the Taj out there—the CG and the Taj and the darkness, as though they're doing the opera near the Taj. So that was a CG creation, but virtually all of it is real, and I wanted that, you know. I had just made a film that had been quite CG. I tried to make Sunshine with as little CG as possible, but there's still a quite a substantial amount of it.
AVC: Were there places it was difficult to get permission to film?
DB: There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. [Snickers.] And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently. The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you. You have to remain optimistic, and that's clearly how people live their lives there. Against all the odds, they retain kind of a spirit which allows them to get through against insufferable odds. The poverty, the traffic, the lack of infrastructure, the flooding during the monsoons—there's just so many things that are coming at you at the whole time that your spirit has to remain, and that's certainly true. It enters the minutia of filming.
AVC: What kind of weird, simple thing could you not get permission for?
DB: We wanted to do an aerial shot, very simple from a helicopter. I think the guy at India Take One thought, "They're cool. No problem. We'll just ask the right guy, and that'll be fine." But in fact we came across the guy and he made us go through the whole administrative process, which meant we weren't allowed to take up—no Westerners were allowed in the helicopter, and it would have to be an Indian cameraman. So we nominated our second-unit cameraman, who was a native Indian, and we duly applied for permission. This started about 18 months ago. We applied for permission, and I kept asking every couple of months about it, and it was making its way through gradually. It was in Delhi, and then it was somewhere else. Two or three weeks before the Toronto Film Festival, we finally got permission to shoot from the sky in India. You just politely nod. Obviously, the film was locked by then, so it was no good to us. India Take One, which had applied for it, was happy, because they'll sell their permission to someone else, through another film crew who won't need to wait 18 months to get permission.
And we already, of course, had been up in a helicopter with a cameraman. I had already taken up this still camera which shoots about 11 frames per second, because it just looked like I was a tourist going up there taking a photograph. And then we used that. So there's always ways around these blocks, but you just have to remain optimistic the whole time. Otherwise, it just crushes you.
AVC: You portray the police in Mumbai as corrupt and violent, using torture pretty casually. Was there any script oversight from the Indian government? Were things like that a problem?
DB: Yes, there is significant script oversight. You're made to submit everything that you shoot to the Indian government before you shoot it, and once you've shot it, before the film is ever seen in any capacity, it has to be censored by the Indian government. And if you try and smuggle film out, it will be confiscated at the borders and will probably spend many, many months being vetted, so it's pretty emphatic. Of course, the truth is, it doesn't quite work like that, like everything in India.
For instance, the police-station scene you're referring to, we had to submit that, because it involved a police station, and we needed to get in and see police stations. We were expecting, as you were probably hinting—you'd think that it'd be trouble there. So they sent back a written response saying that the scene was fine, but it was very important that no one involved in the torture be above the rank of inspector. And that was it. And that tells you everything you needed to know, that it goes on all the time, and they're just protecting the big guys from any involvement. We went around the police stations, and you can see the equipment. It's not hidden away. [Laughing.] It's right there in the corners, you know, these different bits of equipment.
And you talk to the local people on the crew, they'll say, "Yeah, if you're from a certain class, and you are arrested for anything other than a traffic offense, you've got a chance you're going to get knocked about a bit." The scene, the way I directed it, it's slightly comic, but of course it's resonant in the West, at the moment especially. In America, nobody laughs. It's taken very, very seriously, as though I'm trying to make a point about torturing, whereas, in fact, it was a reaction, like everything in the film, to India and what goes on there. I thought it was a comic scene, really, in a way. If you look at it carefully, it is played as a comic scene. The actors were supposed to play it like that. One says, "What have you been doing all night?" and the other says, "You know, just giving him some electricity. That'll loosen his tongue." It's played in a slightly comic level, but it screeches in silence [in America.] Understandably, of course, but it is screeching in silence.
AVC: Do you have to worry as a director how things will play in different countries, based on politics and the current situation?
DB: No. You worry about everything, but you can't over-worry about stuff like that, because the film was meant to be from the perspective of these kids; shot as a subjective experience. You take a limited amount of money for it, and it doesn't have to answer some of the questions you're suggesting on how Western audiences will view it. It's protected in that it's made quite frugally, so we can tell it the way we want to tell it: truthfully. Each of the scenes feel truthful in the way we made them. Certainly the perspective on poverty is interesting and a mental challenge. You go in with your inbuilt morality and you're very shocked and concerned and horrified by seeing children who have been maimed to make them better beggars. Their lives have been dictated by that. But from their perspective, your chance of changing that is nonexistent. You have to see it internally, from their perspective. Their view on destiny is keen. It's very hard to get your head around.
For us, destiny always feels… if you obey, it's almost a passive thing. I didn't think that was admirable, but when you get there and see the way it works and the connection that's there between people, it's not just about the destiny of someone who has been crippled like that, but it's also about someone who has benefited from destiny and goodwill. Like [Slumdog co-star Anil] Kapoor, he's a big star, and he feels connected to that guy in a way that we don't really do anymore. He feels a connection because of the role of destiny. It's very complex, and if there was a perspective, that's what I would go for. Not the Western perspective of "Is there anything we can do to change these people's lives?" That didn't feel an appropriate way of approaching it.
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