By Ada Tseng
Director Danny Boyle and writer Simon Beaufoy know it takes more than money to make your heart sing.
What strikes me about the almost-universal adulation that Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire has been enjoying from the American press (and early festival audiences) is that the film has some damn good timing. Not to say the film doesn't deserve all the praise that it's been getting, but as the global audience coasts on the highs of witnessing the ulimate underdog make history, as American citizens are being rewarded for believing in the audacity of hope, Slumdog Millionaire dares even longtime cynics to resist the story of a pure-hearted boy from the Mumbai slums who overcomes horrific obstacles to become a millionaire.
This is not to say the film's payoff is even about the millions. Ironically, the film's promotional hook -- that the young Jamal finds himself on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, only to be arrested and accused of cheating -- was an initial turn-off for both the writer and director.
"I just thought, 'I don't want to do a film about Who Wants to be a Millionaire,'" says director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting). "The only reason I read it even, was because I saw Simon [Beaufoy]'s name on it, and I knew him from The Full Monty."
Screenwriter Beaufoy admits that he doesn't even like the game show. But they soon realized the story's greater potential.
The concept for Slumdog Millionaire comes from the debut novel by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup called Q&A. Through a series of flashbacks, the reader comes to understand how the uneducated protagonist, through his own set of life experiences, happens to know all the answers to the quiz show questions.
Although Beaufoy was committed to staying faithful to the core essence of the novel, he was faced with a couple of challenges: 1) the book is written as a collection of disconnected short stories, and 2) it's basically about a poor kid winning a lot of money.
Beaufoy knew that the film version needed an overarching quest that was more meaningful than the pursuit of a big cash prize.
"My heart does not sing at the end of the film, if the slum kid gets in his Ferrari and drives back to his place, you know?" Beaufoy laughs. "That's just not my bag."
After spending some time in Bombay, home of India's larger-than-life film industry, Beaufoy quickly figured out the key to the movie.
"As a kid, I'd watch the telly and think, 'What on Earth are they up to?'" says Beaufoy, recalling his reaction to all of Bollywood's singing and dancing. "But you go there, and you just get it. Because it's such a romantic, passionate place. So I thought, 'It's a love story. It's got to be a love story.'"
Once he made his decision, Beaufoy had to work backwards. He created a love interest for Jamal, Latika, who is played at three different ages (seven, thirteen, and eighteen) by Rubina Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, and Freida Pinto. Then, he had to find stories about how the two characters would keep finding and losing each other over the course of a decade. The film also centers around the loyal but volatile connection between two brothers, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, Tanay Hemant Chheda, and Dev Patel) and Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, and Madhur Mittal). As children, they call themselves "The Three Musketeers," but as they grow into young adults, nothing is certain.
"This is classic Indian film storytelling," says Boyle. "Two brothers: a good brother and a bad brother. One brother, if you look at everything he does, it's based on violence, it's based on money, it's based on a kind of vengeance. But the hero has the grace to overcome [tragedy]. It doesn't drive him to vengeance. He's marked by it, but not scarred by it."
While most of Bollywood is filmed in urban India, Boyle was determined to shoot in Mumbai's infamous, but rarely explored, slums. They shot in Dharavi, a "mega-slum" that is home to more than one million people, and the Juhu slum, a shantytown near the Mumbai airport.
Beaufoy was determined to capture the slums of Mumbai with as much authenticity as possible. With his background in documentary filmmaking, he was accustomed to going to the streets, talking to people, and looking at the landscapes before he began to visualize the story.
"I was trying to find out what everyone was talking about in the little tea shops," says Beaufoy. "They were all talking about this big gangster trial that was going on, and I was really fascinated. And then the Hindu-Muslim tensions were all bubbling up at the time, and I thought, well this is what I have to write about because this is what they're all talking about. This is the real stuff."
It took a whole team to paint a faithful portrait of the city. The casting director Loveleen Tandan is credited as a co-director, and she was instrumental in working with the child actors (many of whom are actual kids from the slums), overseeing the Hindi parts of the film, and catching cultural contradictions and errors. Boyle also credits his first assistant director Raj Acharya for being an immense help, and he is particularly happy with the the work of the sound team for enhancing the sensory experience of the film.
"Doing live sound in Mumbai is sort of for the certifiably insane only," jokes Boyle. "It just doesn't work, and most people don't even try it. But of course, if you don't have it, it doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound like Mumbai, which is a miasma of noise. It's 20 million people in a tiny island, and you can't replicate it. You've got to capture it."
The Slumdog Millionaire production required Boyle to relinquish a lot of the comfort and control that is usually cherished by film directors. The crew had to be quick (getting the shot before they were swarmed by film-fascinated bystanders), creative (sending in a fake documentary crew to get extra footage when the Taj Mahal security wouldn't let them shoot anymore), and flexible (working with Bollywood stars like Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, and Shruti Seth, who are in such high demand, required Boyle to work around their schedules). But Boyle embraced the chaos. The filmmakers quickly learned it was smarter to let India take over.
"I went there as this rather English, slightly shy, retiring, repressed writer who writes subtextually," recalls Beaufoy. "A blink here and a blink there. The 'We're not really saying what we mean here, are we?' type of writing. And you go [to Bombay], and the place is so full of extremes. It's way too hot, the color blasts at your retina, everything about it is way too much. And it opened up a whole way of writing to me that I had kind of forgotten about -- very operatic, very grand, kind of melodramatic."
"A word like melodrama before, I'd be going 'Oh, stay away from melodrama. I don't like that,'" he continues. "But there, it's just the language you tell your stories in. So I was always concerned to put the most brutal next to the funny. Squeeze the extremes together, like someone like Dickens would, or what you'd get in an opera."
The brutal was just as important as the beautiful. "The whole time we stayed out there, we would always drive out to where we were going," recalls Boyle. "[At] the first corner, there was a guy there the whole time that had no hands, and you could see his hands had clearly been cut off. So you got to get your head 'round that. The kind of moral horror you feel about that, has absolutely no value to him at all. You want to give him a 1,000 pounds, but it's absolutely irrelevant to him because the corner is run by a gangster, and he'll just take the money off him.
"So already your preconceptions, your values, are irrelevant. You have to try and see it inside his head. You have to tell the story of the people who live there. I don't see it as grim. I think of it as honest, you know? You're trying to honestly represent something."
"Coming from London, I had this stupid preconceived notion, a stereotype of what a slum would be," says British actor Patel, who had only been to India once prior to getting the role of Jamal. "Sitting at home on my couch eating freakin' popcorn, you'd see these health aid adverts on TV. You see this malnourished kid holding up an empty bottle of food, and they're depressed. The day I woke up to go on this location scout [to a slum called Tal Aviv], I thought, 'Damn its gonna be a bloody hard day, I'm gonna be depressed.' And I was so glad to be proved wrong when I was there, because that shaped my character.
"When you're there, all you get is an overwhelming sense of community," he continues. "They call them slums, but they are colonies. Everyone knows everyone and they're all working together in unison, like one molecule, like one cell. I remember there was this kid walking down the slum, he had this vest on, he's licking an icelolly, it's all dripping down his top, and there's a group of three burly men. And one guy saw the boy, picked him up, put him next to him, pulled out a handkerchief, cleaned him up, and pushed him along back on his journey. And I was like, Wow. In London, you can't do that. He didn't know that kid. Here, they all look after each other."
"Some pessimists would say it's fantasy," says Boyle, "but I do believe in mining hope out of it somehow. What I did love about India is the amazing spirit. It's a very open, positive country. Very forward-looking in many ways, ironically, given the history and the problems, but there's an incredible future ahead of it. You can feel that. There's a kind of optimism which I liked a lot."
The idea of hope and destiny plays an important role in Slumdog Millionaire. Because the story manages to interweave brash strokes of intensity while grounding the over-the-top emotions in sober realism, audiences are swept up in the fairy-tale journey without feeling like it's a fairy tale. You believe in the boy who's kept his wide-eyed innocence despite a childhood filled with jeopardy; you believe that, even when he's being hung by his hands from the ceiling and tortured by jaded police inspectors, he sees no reason to answer questions with anything other than the truth; and most of all, you believe in the dreamer who could really give a shit about 20 million rupees, because all he's looking for is this girl. He's known since he was seven years old that he's destined to be with her.
The film's magic, underdog spirit and unpredictable adventure has transcended from fiction into real life. At one point, their production company, Warner Independent Pictures, was going to give Slumdog Millionaire a straight-to-DVD release. It wasn't until it received such strong reactions at the Toronto International Film Festival that co-distributor Fox Searchlight swooped in to fund its theatrical release. Now, the film's been getting Oscar buzz, Dev Patel (whose only other professional role was on the British teen show Skins) and Freida Pinto (acting in her very first film role) have gotten the best breakthrough roles a young actor can ask for, and even the two child actors from the slums that play young Jamal and Latika have been placed in schools and will hopefully get a chance at an education.
So how did an India-set melodrama, helmed by two Brits, about a game show that no one watches anymore get American critics so uncharacteristically united in praise? Perhaps we're learning to believe. What better time than now to truly appeciate, even cling onto, optimism despite seemingly dire circumstances? What better time to learn to balance, even relish, the extremes?
There's a scene in Slumdog Millionaire which is sort of symbolic of the entire movie. In the Juhu slum, Beaufoy came across big piers with a lone outdoor public toilet at the end of them. Since they're right next to the airport, a person could be doing his business, surrounded by flimsy wooden walls, and have a grandstand view of planes flying in and landing onto the private airstrip.
"I just thought, that's fantastic!" says Beaufoy. "That sums up India, doesn't it? You've got the poorest people in the world watching the film stars coming in. They're watching it like they're on telly."
Transformed into a scene in the film, Jamal, as a little boy, is sitting on the toilet, when he hears screams that his favorite film star Amitabh Bachchan has just landed. Unfortunately, in this do-or-die moment, he finds himself locked inside the wooden stall, and his only option of escape is to dive into the cesspool of feces underneath. Watching this little burst of energy crawl out, covered in chunky brown goodness (in real life, Boyle told the SF Chronicle they used combination of chocolate and peanut butter to create the proper effect), rush over past the crowd, and successfully get an autograph from his all-time favorite actor -- it's unsettling, shocking, and appalling in a lot of ways, but somehow you're left so unbelievably happy.
Slumdog Millionaire opened in selected theaters on November 12th and will getting a wide release on November 27th.
Published: Friday, November 14, 2008
