Q&A: Danny Boyle on ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

Danny Boyle (Credit: Ishika Mohan/Fox Searchlight)

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For director Danny Boyle, each new project is like a sprint through an entirely different filmmaking genre.

His “28 Days Later” wasn’t just a zombie movie—it imagined how London would look and feel after the apocalypse. The family film “Millions” wove a profound fable touching on issues of class, faith and morality. And his energetic breakthrough, “Trainspotting,” was a rip-roaring trek through the Edinburgh drug scene.

Now Boyle is earning some of the best buzz of his career for “Slumdog Millionaire,” a sweeping romance with hints of Bollywood reverie. Based on the novel “Q&A” by Vikas Swarup, “Millionaire” unfolds in the slums of Mumbai, telling the life story of 18-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) as he takes the hot seat as a contestant on India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” His goal: To make enough money to win the heart of Latika (Freida Pinto), the girl he once loved and lost to a more wealthy man.

We spoke with the director about the challenges of bringing the film, already tipped as a major Oscar contender, to the screen, and why it’s important to keep taking risks.

With this film you went from having a distributor, to losing your distributor, to getting into the Toronto film festival and ultimately winning the audience award. That must have been quite a wild ride.
A couple months ago we were finishing the editing on the movie, and then there was the collapse of all these independent distributors. We lost our North American distributor, Warner Independent, and we thought we were probably just going to end up on DVD. It was devastating.

But then we got into Toronto and Telluride [film festivals] and it sent out a vibration. Warner showed it to Peter Rice at Fox Searchlight [the film’s ultimate distributor], and there was such huge enthusiasm. And then we won the audience award, and we realized there was something extraordinary going on. In India, they believe in these serendipitous things. So that’s what I started to think, that the gods were working in my favor.

The movie places viewers right into the middle of India’s slums, with all the dirt and poverty and outhouses. How did you approach staging a romance in the midst of these dire conditions?
I didn’t want to go [to India] and bring a Western perspective, and depict this all as shocking. This isn’t a Western kid that we’re following in this story, but a kid who was born there. And like all kids, what he sees around him everyday is normal. Everything you see [in the film], it’s the reality of their situation. There are no toilets in the slums. It’s easy to say this is all disgusting, but that’s not the way these people see it.

Obviously, it would be easy to criticize this government that fails to provide these basic services even as they’re spending money on nuclear weapons and planning on going to the moon. But the people who live here don’t want you to focus on that. They just want you to show them some respect and to not make a movie that will pity them.

In the movie, Jamal goes on national TV to win over a girl. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken to impress a crush?
The biggest risk … I think I mostly do the same thing every time, make them a CD of music. It used to be a cassette of my favorite songs, but that would probably be it. The technology’s changed but the technique’s the same. I’d probably want to serenade them, but I’m pretty tone deaf.
 
Every film you make seems to touch upon a new genre. What’s your motivation for that—are you easily bored?
I think you've got to take risks with making films—especially if you ever have a significant success. You would think that success would make you arrogant and confident, but in a weird kind of way, the danger is that success actually makes you head for safety. So I’ve tried to do the opposite. That’s something you have to embrace—that sometimes these risks will work and sometimes they won’t.

In “Trainspotting,” there’s the scene with the baby on the ceiling, and the producer hated it. But you’ve got to stick with it. It’s part of [what] makes us want to go to the cinema—not to see something where we know what’s going to happen. As a director, you have to have some element that will make someone want to watch the movie on a big screen in the dark with 50 strangers.

So what’s the next risk for you?
I actually have no plans. I tend to be very monogamous—only working on one thing at a time. But I’m tempted to do something that’s really a change of pace. Maybe an animated film. That would definitely throw people off.

Find showtimes for "Slumdog Millionaire."