Danny Boyle Interview

When Danny Boyle’s parents emigrated from Galway to Manchester in the 1940’s, they were among hundreds of thousands of Irish families who took economic refuge in industrial cities, enduring regular casual racism as they went. But it was precisely this experience of his parents that helped shape the sensibility of their filmmaker son Danny and which oddly enough led him to India and the making of the very wonderful “Slumdog Millionaire.”

“ My dad was there in India in the war. He used to talk about it. There were tens of thousands of guys in Bombay being trained to invade Japan. They were there 16 months and he was there when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and he talked about as a young man, nobody told him anything about it but they knew that they were going to go home.

“ He loved India, the way he talked about it. I mean, he saw some terrible things there and some amazing things and he always used to talk to me about it. In the ‘60s and ‘70s in the UK there was a lot of really racist television and I always used to remember him saying “that’s not right” on the television.

“ He really didn’t like it the way that Indians were made fun of and Pakistanis were made fun of on the television, and of course Irish people for that matter, but this stayed with me and making this movie was the first time I ever went to India.”

Boyle remains very much an outsider to this day, deliberately so in many ways, in spite of the adulation his work has brought him. He has often been courted by Hollywood, but is uninterested in the system which one might imagine might be subvertible in his jagged hands. He’s in town to talk about “Slumdog Millionaire” and do the marketing of it, but says he has never felt at home in Los Angeles.

“ I love energy films. When films first began, the film industry was called the motion picture industry. It’s about motion but when our predecessors first went to films they were mesmerized by trains moving!” he giggles at the recalled innocence, but he’s only partly joking.

I love action movies, even really dumb stupid ones that are not very good. I love that sense of forward momentum in films. It seems to me to be really optimistic and progressive really that there’s always a movement forward. You get older yourself but you realize that films, the appetite of films doesn’t get older. If anything, it gets slightly younger all the time and it wants youth to take it forward, to be part of that forward motion so a lot of the time I spend is trying to inspire the crew to join in that energy and make the film in the right spirit.”

The spirit of “Slumdog Millionaire” is huge, embracing a story of modern Bombay and telling a fresh rags to riches story, where the protagonist is on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, not because he wants to get rich quick, but to find a lost love he knows will be watching the show.

Boyle pushed himself and his crew very hard, in a very different way in the making of this movie, pushing the boundaries with small, inexpensive digital cameras which were used often surreptitiously and without the people of Mumbai even knowing a movie was being made.

“ I am not an auteur,” says one of the most unique voices in modern cinema. “I do writer’s and scripts and I think the most important thing about a film is its spirit both in terms of what it’s about and the way you make it and how you behave when you make it and those kind of things transfer somehow.

“ We used these digital system called an SI2K which is a hard drive like a computer Notebook like a Mac Notebook, Pro Book on the back of the cameraman in a rucksack and then he holds in his hand the lens and it’s about as big as a regular one of these cameras.

“ It’s got a lot of advantages, very flexible, very mobile but it’s also in India, people are used to quite big cameras, so seeing a kind of white guy run through the slums chasing children with a rucksack on his back, you think “what’s going on there?” You don’t really think a film’s being made so it had some advantages of distracting people like that. It’s very, very flexible and allows you to do kind of almost documentary style film-making if you want. It’s a huge advantage in India where everything is changing all the time.”

The visual style of “Slumdog Millionaire” is a complete feast, which makes no attempt to put rose tinted spectacles over modern Indian life, but tells a great story which just a tiny amount of sentimentality. Boyle says the experience of working in India as a director meant he had to learn to cede the one thing which is central to his function as a director: control.

“ Directors are really about control. What you do as a director is you arrive somewhere you got to control it so that you can repeat it from different angles. Forget that in India. Or forget that in Mumbai. Nothing. You can’t control
anything. It’s like irrelevant. There are patterns in the city but they’re not going to be discernible to a westerner, you know. You’ve got to go with it and let it fit your narrative into the story, into the city and the fabric of the city which means that you shoot, not really documentary style because it’s such an incredibly powerful narrative, it’s a very and Simon Beaufoy writes so clearly.

“ But, having said that, you still got to let the thing just flow into the city and some days you would think we’re not going to get anything done. It’ll be 4 o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve not shot anything and then you’re thinking the report sheet that’s going to go back to Warner Independent, to Pathe is going to say he shot nothing today (Laughter) and then suddenly it comes back to you the city comes back as this wave and brings the film with it and you think “how did that happen?” and you’ve got more than you could have ever imagined in a scene.

It’s an incredibly generous place as well, given how poor some people are there so it’s a wonderful place to film if you have the right attitude. If you want to control it, change it, you know, organize it, it’s mad. It’s like what was it the guy who held back the sea Canute, you know, kind of going stop, you know. It’s just - it’s just foolish to even attempt it, you know.”