Interview with 'Slumdog' Director Danny Boyle

When I first saw Slumdog Millionaire, I thought it was one of the best films of the year. Then I saw it again and believed it stood alone as the best film of the year. The third time I saw it, I looked for different things - the way each scene sounded, the way the story linked its distinct chapters - and I realized that director Danny Boyle had done the remarkable: He had made a difficult, original film look easy. I had the chance to talk to Boyle recently, though before he was nominated for the Academy Award he will almost surely win this Sunday, about his future Best Picture winner and the perils of shooting a movie in India with untrained child actors. Big Picture: Are you aware of a thread that ties all of your movies together? They're very distinctive, and I wouldn't say one is like the next, but are there things - ideals, concepts - that you find you revisit a lot? Danny Boyle: You never think like that, you never try to. You really don't think about it...until you do the press tour (laughs) and journalists like yourself rightly connect them. Because I do - I watch other people's movies and see connections like that. But there's usually money around somewhere. That's the great equalizer. It's certainly one of the great ingredients of cinema. Godard said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, which is true. But you need a bag of money, as well, ideally. The first film I did was literally about a bag of money. I remember, we hired a million pounds for a shot. You can hire a million pounds for a day, costs you about 15,000 pounds a day. And you have it in front of you, it's there, and that's the only time you're ever going to be near a million pounds, as such. So I suppose there's that. I like underdogs. I like popping people into extreme situations in which they look like they're gonna get crushed. And then they survive, they swim and don't sink. They make their own way. [For Slumdog], I didn't want guys who looked like beefcake. I wanted someone who looked inadequate in a way, who you thought, 'This guy is going to get spat out by this show,' maybe give him a little prize or maybe humiliate him and send him home. That's why I wanted a guy who looks like he looks, and yet, he's got the determination, the steeliness. He's gonna push through. There's another element to it, as well, and it's the youth of the character. He sees pretty traumatic things at such a young age, and then his brother pulls a gun on him at 12 or 13, and so when he's on the show at 18, he's had to power through so many things already. Yeah, and his brother has a long way to come back from that. It doesn't quite read like this, but I always had this idea that the two brothers see the death of their mother - this terrible violence - and that's the moment where they separate. Salim is scarred by the violence and psychopathically turns to violence, and he must have power over people. Whatever he has to do get power, he wants it, so that the never has to be in that position again. Jamal sees beyond it. He never forgets it, but he has the grace to overcome it and move on. It's classic Indian storytelling: The good brother, the bad brother, and the mother is the pivotal moment between them. When you're working with young actors, particularly the kids from Mumbai who aren't even actors, do you have to spell that out for them, or do you just take it more literally and have them play the scene for the scene? Pretty much literal. Like Scoresese says, your subtext should be smuggled in, with as few people aware of it as possible. Maybe you're not aware it yourself until you get home later. But yeah, your agenda, whatever it is, should be smuggled in eventually, I think. The surface should be just exhilarating, really. It should capture you. It's like: He hijacks the show for his own ends. We hijack the show for our ends, to hijack you. That's the deal. You'll use techniques to hijack people, and I'm a big believer in it. Look at the beginning of the film particularly. You have a big chase at the beginning, which is a way of tumbling people into a world where they'd go, "Do I really wanna watch?" It's a big ask. It's the normal province of an art film, and it's got subtitles as well - "Am I really gonna watch this?" And you try to push people in and slam the door on them so they can't get out. I was very conscious of that. And that's the way I felt when we landed, like I was being hijacked by the city. Are you going to be see terrible things that confront your own humanity? Absolutely. Stark. Things I've never known before. What do you think of a man who had his hands cut off to make him a better beggar? And he's the same age as you, and he's asking for money, and you're told not to give him money because it just goes to gangsters. What are you gonna do? You always hear that movies made on water are rife with problems, and anything that could go wrong will. I would suspect the same is true filming on any location to a degree, but particularly in the third world. Did you get a lot of that in Mumbai and did you expect a lot of it? I was warned about that and it informed my mental approach. I just thought, "I'm not going to be weighed down by the usual stuff on films, everyone going off about how difficult it is." And it's bullshit in one sense because you're so lucky to be making films. But I could see it. I took ten crew and three or four of them didn't want to be there. And it was all about difficulties, and you just think, "Oh, shut the fuck up. It's diarrhea. It's not the end of the world." And the way the city is presented, if you've been oblivious to Mumbai before now, it's not a mile or two of culture and prosperity and then you get to the slums. It's all stacked on top of each other. You used to see it in New York, but it's so developed now you don't get it as much. You just see this staggering wealth alongside absolute filth. What is extraordinary about Mumbai is that they won't clear it away because there's something deeper there that connects the different destinities of people. They feel it quite profoundly. It's not guilt, that Western thing about feeling guilty about your success. It binds them together. They do not clear away the slum. They build these tower blocks and there's a skirt built along the bottom of them with slums. They're not segregated - up the hill, over the hill - they're just right there.And so you get a chance [to film there] as a filmmaker, that's dynamic. People say, "How did you make the transition between a kid being blinded deliberately to a Bollywood song and dance at the end?" And the answer is, there is no transition. They're just side by side.

Comments

[Will]

Great interview. I think it's time to bring back the podcast!