‘Trainspotting’ director turns his lens on a dark but uplifting tale from Mumbai slums

“I’d never been to India,” says Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle.  “My dad was there in the war and had talked to me endlessly about it and I’d always wanted to go.    I thought it was an extraordinary place in the extremes that you experience there.  But, more importantly, the challenges that you face are just beyond anything you can imagine.”

     Boyle is known for his work on Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who’s just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's ‘‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’

     Arrested on suspicion of cheating, he tells the police the story of his life on the streets, that he has no interest in the money from the show. So, why is he there and how is it he knows all the answers?

     Channel 4 Head of Film and Drama Tessa Ross first became aware of the story when she received a call from Film4’s book scout, Kate Sinclair. She’d read a proof of ‘an extraordinary story’, by Indian bureaucrat-author Vikas Swaroop, named “Q & A”. Ross immediately optioned the book and then brought on board writer Simon Beaufoy (of Full Monty fame) to adapt the screenplay.

     “The biggest problem in converting the book to a screenplay was that it was effectively a series of stories… twelve short stories,” says Beaufoy.  “Some of which weren’t even linked in any way. It had no over-arching narrative. It didn’t take someone from birth all the way through life. It was rather disjointed and some of the stories were almost discrete little tales that had no reference to the main characters at all.”

     “My job was to find this narrative, to trace a story that went all the way through, while still being able to jump back to the story of the police interrogation and ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’,” says Beaufoy. That was a particular challenge.”

     “Simon has a very warm, specific voice which is particularly suited to this material,” says Slumdog  producer Christian Colson. “Simon came up with the new title of Slumdog Millionaire, which we all fell in love with.  I guess in classical terms the story is a comedy in so far as it describes a movement from disorder towards harmony.  It’s a comedy but it’s also, at times, a horrifying drama.  There are moments of great pain and pathos. It’s a fairytale and like all the best fairytales, it has moments of real darkness and horror.  There is a great mix of things that really make you laugh and make you cry and make you gasp.”

     Boyle’s crew flew to India and shot the film in its largest slum, Dharavi, and in Juhu, next to the airport and clearly visible by anyone flying into Mumbai.  The population is estimated to be more than 1 million in that area alone.  Mumbai’s metropolitan population of 22 million is expanding at an alarming rate.

     “We put as many of those real slum-dwelling people in the film as we could get,” says Boyle.  “It’s actually a thriving, bustling mini-metropolis.  Now, in fact, what’s happened, because India is a democracy, is that the slums have become incredibly powerful places politically because they have a lot of people in them.  There are a lot of votes in a small area. So that they actually become, ironically, incredibly powerful and actually a lot of people don’t want the slums cleared. There’s a big plan to clear Dharavi at the moment but a lot of those who live there don’t want it cleared. They’re very suspicious of what they’ll be given in its place.

     The Tulip Star, an abandoned five star hotel in Mumbai, “A very creepy place” according to Colson, was an unplanned location Boyle suggested.  “It wasn’t scripted to be an empty hotel,” says Boyle. “It was scripted to be a fully functioning hotel. It just gave those scenes an added layer of poignancy.  So we kept it in and saved two days on the schedule that we then used up shooting other stuff.”

     “What is extraordinary about India is that it’s one of the world’s leading nuclear powers,” says Boyle. “It’s got nuclear weapons.  So it’s in the top six or eight nuclear powers in the world.  But on the other hand, there are no public toilets.”

     The result of Beaufoy’s script and Boyle’s direction is a movie experience both harrowing and funny, full of pathos yet ultimately uplifting as a testament to the indestructible nature of the human  spirit. Highly recommended.

Slumdog Millionaire

Release Date: November 12th, 2008 (USA)

Rated R for some violence, disturbing images and language.

Duration: 2 hrs.

Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures