It's not often that a movie receives a standing ovation at the end of a film festival screening. The only time I saw it happen was at Cannes for Haskell Wexler's
Latino, a film with anti-American sentiments. But Danny Boyle's exuberant
Slumdog Millionaire received a similarly rapturous greeting after its Austin premiere.
It's a feel-great story about Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan from the streets of Mumbai who's one question away from winning the 20 million rupee jackpot on the Indian version of
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and is arrested by police on suspicion that he must be cheating. The quiz show proves to be a framing device for Jamal to flash back on the events that shaped his life - events that enable him to answer the game show questions. At the heart of the movie is Jamal's attempts to reconnect with the love of his life, Latika, who he was separated from as a child. The power of love to transcend a life of struggle and hardship is one of the film's most resonant themes.
Written by Simon Beaufoy (
The Full Monty), the film won the Audience Award at the Toronto Fim Festival, and has been generating steady buzz ever since, as it winds its way to its Nov. 28 U.S. release. Most everyone I spoke with the following day had the dazed look of people still caught up in a magical experience, the kind only a great film can deliver.
Boyle was a busy man at Austin, honored with the Extraordinary Contribution To Film Award and rushing from one luncheon to the next. I managed to catch up with him for a few minutes between engagements. In person, he's friendly, unassuming, and bursting with the kind of hyper-kinetic energy that defines his visual style.
Filmmaker Magazine: Watching the film, it's like we're plunged into the streets of Mumbai with these kids. How did you capture the action so vividly?
Danny Boyle: I try to make films with subjective POVS that make you fel like you're caught up in the action. You have no choice but to experience the film. For
Slumdog, we used a silicon imaging prototype camera, 512K, which was strapped to a recorder on the cameraman's back. The recorder connects to a camera lens work on the hand, which allowed us to create an extra dynamism and flexibility, more than you'd get in a Steadicam shot.
Filmmaker: How did you get attached to the material? Had you read the novel (by Indian writer Vikas Swaroop) ?
Boyle: I read the novel out of respect for the writer. I didn't really want to do a film about
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But once I read the first ten pages of the script, I was hooked.
Filmmaker: What attracted you to the material?
Boyle: It was just so fresh, and it was a classic underdog story. And it was set in an India in transition. India is a tiger economy. For filmmaking, Mumbai is the future - HBO's been here, Spielberg was here. Capitalism has to keep expanding.
Filmmaker: Commercially, were you concerned to make a film with an all-Indian cast?
Boyle: You couldn't make it with any other type of cast; there was no choice. Call it arrogance, or a temporary feeling of infallibility, but I since I loved it, so I felt everybody would love it. The people who turned it down, I'd look at them like, 'are you fucking nuts'?
Filmmaker: How was it working with the children of Mumbai?
Boyle: The sript was written in English, but when we got to India, we discovered that seven-year-old Hindi children aren't old enough to grasp English, so we switched the script into Hindi. I had to call the financiers and tell them the first third of the script would be in Hindi with subtitles. They thought I had gone mad, that I was going to come back with some meditation movie on India.
Filmmaker: But it worked. You get this rare look inside an exotic culture that most of us never get to see.
Boyle: In a strange way, it makes the film more acessible, because it's more believable.
Filmmaker: The film got a standing ovation. When you came onstage after the film for the Q&A, the audience was still standing. What does that feel like?
Boyle: It was fantastic, of course, but truthfully all I could think of was what's wrong; how could I have improved it? You're always expecting people to say 'what was that'? when the film is done. Must be that British pessimism.
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posted by Graham Flashner @ 10/21/2008 10:18:00 AM
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