SFBG’s Louis Peitzman interviews Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle on the eve of the release of his latest flick, Slumdog Millionaire
L-R: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Photo by Ishika Mohan
San Francisco Bay Guardian: Slumdog Millionaire is a very colorful and vibrant film. Obviously much of that has to do with the art direction and cinematography, but what was your role, as a director, in creating that look?
Danny Boyle: It was all linked to the central approach of this, which is, we didn’t try — because you can’t, is the real reason — to control it or recreate bits of it or change it. You’ve got two approaches as far as I can see. You either stand back and look at it sort of pictorially, which I didn’t really want to do. We did some tests like that and that is an approach, and you can see that, especially in photography about India. It is extraordinary to look at sometimes. But I didn’t really want to do that. I just wanted to dive in there and I thought that by the time the story’s over, you’ll have got that pictorial sense of it. You’ll have accumulated it rather than actually be introduced to it bit by bit. So that was the idea, that we would film on the streets, use live sync sound as much as we could, and actually not change things, not redesign things, and if they did change, which they did — they’d change in front of your eyes, literally — we’d go with that change. So there wouldn’t be any obsession with continuity, like there is normally on films. And we just accepted the fact — if you see it again, you’ll notice there are lots of people looking at the camera, and there’s guys saying, “No filming here” to the camera, things like that, which are all left in. And you just go with that as an approach, and you benefit from it. It drives you mad in one sense, in the controlled, precise think, but in the other way, you get life. You get a sense of it, or I hope you do. You get a bit of the flavor of what Mumbai is like as this electric city. So that was the idea; that was the approach.
SFBG: Going back to what you said about people looking into the camera and other moments like that, it feels like the movie goes back and forth between fantasy and realism. It’s almost a fairy tale but with elements of real life. Was that something you were going for?
DB: It’s just India, that. Their movies are fantastical, kind of like ridiculous things, and the life on the street is brutal in one sense, and yet the two sit together. That’s the whole point. It’s why they sit together really. So you’re infected by that. It’s so melodramatic, the story, in one sense. It’s two brothers, of course — a good brother and a bad brother, and that is absolutely key to Indian cinema. That idea of good brother and bad brother. And they usually lose sight of their mother — their mother is kidnapped or lost — and then they find their mother again at the end when they’re reconciled. But the bad boy has to die. And then there’s always this thing about eternal love, which is also key to cinema there, which is this everlasting love that’s pure and will overcome all obstacles. So those are the kind of things that you kind of get infected by. It’s a bit like coming to America and you make a crime film, because crime and the way the country’s been built, crime has been so linked to the way the country’s been built, so inevitably, there is a reason why there’s so much crime in American movies, why it’s so key to American movies, because it’s a part of the culture.
Director Danny Boyle. Photo by Ishika Mohan
So you end up, as a foreigner coming here, your film would be partly about crime inevitably. There are certain things that you just accumulate from the place, and you can’t resist or avoid. And Simon [Beaufoy] got that in the writing; he got that partly from the book, but also from his own experiences, ’cause he toured India 20 years ago and he’d always wanted to write about it and never been able to find a key way in. He’d always wanted to write about it, and like me, he’d never wanted to do a Westerner in India. And I would never do a film like that. I don’t want to watch Western guys wandering around India or anything like that. I sort of made a film like that, The Beach (2000), and I found it a very unsatisfying way of dipping into a country and just taking from a country for your own purposes. I much prefer to go there and try to submerge myself and the story in the place, and then come out of it. There are problems because studios say, “Well, there’s no white guys in it, there are no recognizable names,” but that’s the way things are gonna go. Fortunately, I think that more of the world is opening up. We’re gonna hopefully share more in a way. I think that’s the way it’s going.