He’s among Britain’s greatest living directors, and he’s back in the city settings he loves for his latest film, charting an Indian slum kid’s progress up the ranks on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? We catch up with Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and now the film that could eclipse them all: Slumdog Millionaire.
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Not that many interviews begin with a globally respected film director spontaneously reassuring their interviewer regarding the current state of the economy. And not too many interviews also incorporate a debate on how and where the women of Indian slums manage to dispose of their excrement in such total secrecy compared to their unabashed menfolk, who think nothing of shitting in the street. But then Danny Boyle, comfortably placed within Britain’s top five finest living directors for the best part of a decade, isn’t someone you would ever call a predictable interviewee.
“You’ll be fine,” he assures me, having opened the conversation with small talk about the dire state of the economy. “How old are you? Oh, you’ll be fine. I remember there was a crisis the first time we brought a proper house. We bought it at the top of the property boom for £189,000, and literally the next week the market crashed and it was suddenly worth, like, £114,000, and it was negative equity. Awful.”
As ever with Danny, the world of film is never more than a sentence away, and true to form he segues swiftly into reminiscence: “I remember meeting Anthony Minghella at the time - late ‘80s, early ‘90s, just after this crash - and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it; you’ll be fine.’ He was right.”
Economy dealt with, time to tackle the really big issues. Time to talk crap, literally. The reason Danny has shite firmly on the brain when we meet for an hour’s chat at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden is that his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, is partly set precisely where the name might suggest: the slums of Mumbai.
Where, Danny is keen to convey: “You do get shit all over you. There’s nowhere to shit; people shit everywhere. Although you never see the women shitting. I was there a year, on and off, and for eight months full-time. You see men doing it all the time. Men and boys. All the time - and you have to get your head around that. But you never see women.”
He pauses to allow the mystery to fully sink in. “There were all these rumours: ‘Oh, they get up in the night’ - but I was up in the night, and I never saw them. There are these little plastic bags everywhere, tied up very neatly. It must be that; that’s the only logical explanation.”
You’ll hear many directors pontificate about getting their hands dirty and bonding as a team, but most of them don’t have contending with the open toilets of Mumbai in mind. Yet without sounding pretentious, Danny manages to turn talk of the most ignoble of circumstances into a subtle point about a working system in which, despite the inherently hierarchical nature of feature film production, basic equalities are acknowledged.
“You can’t get all squeamish about it. We all do it; we’ve just got a very elaborate way of disposing of it over here. It happened to most of us there - it didn’t happen to me, I was very lucky - but it happened that most of us were caught short at some point.”
“Your British crew are mortified that they’ve just had to go in front of you, but there’s nowhere to go. Your Indian crew just look at you and shrug. I remember Thomas the gaffer being caught short; we were on this little island, nothing there. But it was kind of liberating, because we’re so guarded, so private, about that sort of thing in the West, and yet we all do it.”
Whether down to the defecatory egalitarianism of its crew or not, one of the great things about Slumdog Millionaire is that although it successfully holds a magnifying glass to the underbelly of India’s slums, it doesn’t patronise its subject, or seek to suggest that just because your street is your toilet that your life must likewise be a pile of crap.
Like Charles Dickens did well over a century before, writer Simon Beaufoy [The Full Monty] captures in his script for Slumdog Millionaire something of the haphazard, teeming reality of an enormous hive of a city in flux, changing faster than it has at probably any other point in its history. Within that setting, our good-hearted hero, Jamal [Dev Patel, Skins], suffers the slings and arrows that come with a truly outrageous fortune, as he tries to win the woman he loves - if that means going on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, so be it. Danny concurs wholeheartedly with the idea that despite the modern trappings, there’s a Dickensian vibe at work here.
“It’s classic storytelling, isn’t it? The first thing Simon said to me after I read the script and we met was, ‘It’s Dickens. It’s classic Dickens.’ You can’t avoid the shadow of Dickens. It’s absolute fable. Highs and lows, slight hysteria, convenience, coincidence, good brother, bad brother, impossibly beautiful and unattainable girl taken away whenever you get close.”
Perhaps slightly wired on the strong coffee we’re drinking, Danny talks fast and fluently on this topic; clearly a subject that’s dear to him. “We’ve lost that in the West; we’ve exiled the extreme stuff to fantasy and superhero movies. The stuff that’s left is very cerebral, quite dry, serious drama. Maybe a bit of child abuse thrown in, to pep things up. But for this film, Simon embraced this rich, architectured style of Dickensian writing.”
Although the fate-led storytelling itself presents an enjoyably vivid, heightened reality in which plausibility is left by the wayside, the backdrop against which Simon and Danny’s narrative plays out - and the cities they capture so strongly - feel one-hundred-percent true to life.
That’s probably because unlike, say, Wes Anderson (whose 2008 film The Darjeeling Limited features some of the most nauseatingly glib, depressingly crass, and fundamentally dishonest depictions of India ever committed to film), Danny Boyle headed east aiming to capture something of what was really out there, and not simply to depict what was in his head before he went.
Coming with a pre-packaged notion of an entire continent, as some directors do, is rarely the best approach in film-making, and it’s not something local crews warm to either, Danny found.
“They’re funny: the Indian crews say to you, ‘Ah, there’ll be cows in your movie, yeah?’ and they’re taking the piss, because they expect a Westerner to turn up and make it all about shots of sacred cows and all that stuff. So we tried to avoid that,” Danny laughs. “There are a couple of cows in it actually, but they’re incidental cows; you couldn’t avoid them. But you don’t try to crowbar them in. You can’t come with your film pre-made. Obviously you’ve got your scripts, but you’re genuinely open to change.”
A rapport with an Indian crew established, Danny credits his Indian co-director Loveleen Tandan with helping him avoid other cultural clangers. “She started out as casting director, but helped me in every way it’s possible to imagine. You need that; you need somebody who’s got the confidence to tell the director they’re wrong, which a lot of people lack. People just want a quiet life. Culturally, she would tell me if I was wrong about things.”
At this point I raise the spectre of Woody Allen’s later London films. “That’s the problem! Especially with legends. Who’s going to tell a legend, ‘Doesn’t happen like that, love?’ They just go, ‘Sure Woody, fantastic.”
Co-directing with a large local team in a fast-moving foreign country involves a degree of trust and collaboration not often associated with the archetypal lone auteur, an image that still hangs over what we feel great direction might look like. But would a perfectionist, Kubrickean style of film-making ever have worked on a film like this?
“It isn’t a controlled environment, but I think Kubrick would have responded to it. It does make you rethink the way you work straight away. If you want to control Mumbai or change it, or alter it, you might as well go home, because you’re just going to waste money.”
Lest we run away with the idea that Slumdog was filmed on the fly, guerrilla-style, Danny clarifies: “It’s not documentary-type shooting. You’re ambitious - you’re not just recording it as-is - but you don’t try to clear the street or drive it all away, you work around it. If you do try to create a controlled environment, it looks fake. We did a few scenes, and you look at it and go, ‘That’s not Mumbai.’ And you have to dump it and start again.”
As he talks about Mumbai and Eastern psychological differences, it would be easy to get the impression that Danny had undergone a Lennon-esque enlightenment in India, a circumstance that - were it true - you would be right to treat with suspicion, given the slump in quality that too often follows such apparent conversions in the creative industries.
This was certainly a concern for executives at Pathé and Warners when they found out that a third of their supposedly English-language film could now be lost in translation. Danny remembers an awkward phone-call.
“I had to ring Warners and Pathé and tell them a third of the film would now be in Hindi with subtitles. And the silence, Catherine, when I said that. The silence on the other end of the phone… I was in this hotel room very late at night, because LA had just got up, and the silence, the silence!” He laughs again, recalling what one can only imagine as the excruciating tension of that moment. “You could tell they thought, ‘He’s gone insane. He’s going to bring back a fucking yoga film about hippies and Hindi and maharishis.’ That was what they really thought.”
It would eventually become apparent even to studio execs that the change in language for the sections of the film involving young Indian children was the only way to go, and was not symptomatic of a moment of mistaken whimsy on the part of the director.
“Obviously we’d originally sold an English film to Warners and Pathé. But we got out there and started auditions, and of course the only kids that speak English at seven - and even then not very well - are the middle-class kids. Very highly educated kids. And they were so wrong.”
It wasn’t all about their speech: the childhood obesity issue is not confined to Britain. “They’ve got a fast-food problem in India, and the middle-class kids look chubby. I’d be going location scouting with Loveleen around the slums in the afternoons, and the kids look completely different. They’re skinny, they’re lithe - they’re survivors.”
Trusted advisor Loveleen stepped up to the plate at this point and convinced Danny that the portions of the script covering our hero Jamal’s childhood would have to be filmed in Hindi. “So I did it. That’s the joy of not taking too much money. You can take unilateral decisions like that and just say, ‘Translate it.’ We did it and it came alive. The film took off - whoof! - like that.”
I hazard a guess that another major factor in Slumdog Millionaire’s artistic success is that Danny is back in his element: filming in a big city. I trail off mid-sentence, searching for an agreeable way to end a thought that began: “You film cities so well, better than…”
Danny steps in to spare me the embarrassment: “Better than I do other stuff. I can certainly say that. I certainly feel at home. I like nature within the city, but I just don’t get on with the ski-slopes or the beaches or the countryside. They’re fine for a day, two days maximum, but then it’s just, ‘Where are the people?’ Give me the people!”
Indeed, in its frenetic, affectionate story of an underdog struggling against odds stacked high against him in a big city, surrounded by urban contempt for his ‘loser’ status, Slumdog summons Danny’s first major breakthrough, Trainspotting, irresistibly to mind. And of course there’s Slumdog’s soon-to-be infamous toilet-diving scene, something Danny is acutely aware will draw comparisons with the earlier film.
“I was aware of the toilet when we were doing it, and it’s one of the few times when I was really, really aware - ‘I’ve been here before’ - and normally, if you ever have an instinct like that, you change the scene so you’ve not been there before. But it was such a good scene, we had to leave it in.”
We’re back to that British obsession again: “We’re obsessed with toilets. We’re British. You see hundreds of films abroad; you won’t see a toilet in any of them.”
Slumdog Millionaire’s successful mixing of the spirit of Mumbai, of slum kids, Hindi and a country in fast-forward, with British touchstones of Dickensian storytelling, quiz-shows and toilets, anchored successfully by the performance of Skins’ Dev Patel in a breakout lead role, should strike a chord with a national and international audience. Crucially, it’s a film that it’s difficult to imagine being made in any other way, by any other director.
Balancing his healthy respect for his own instincts - and those of his trusted advisers - with a practical awareness of studios’ cash-flow fears seems to be a hallmark of Danny’s working methods. It’s something he illustrates with a story about the difficulties of marrying the ideals of a script with the realities of filming.
“You have to get permission to film everywhere,” he laments as he discusses the film’s various locations. “We ran that side of it like a parallel universe to the film. The bureaucracy, the rubber-stamping, this stuff that takes an eternity, sometimes years - that was run entirely separately as far as possible. You try not to let it affect you as you film; if it did you’d never get the film made. We’d still be there.”
“So the guys apply for what we wanted, and we’d be filming, not thinking about this whole parallel universe, and generally being quite light-hearted about the process.” But when it came to filming at the Taj Mahal, compromise was needed as the ocean of bureaucracy collided with the directorial vision, and the practicalities of interacting with a different culture.
The Taj Mahal and surrounding area is run entirely on the income generated by the tourism at the Taj, overseen by what Danny describes as a “sort of mafia really: photographers, tour-guides, you know. It’s quite sophisticated. They saw us turn up with these kids, and gradually they realised what we were up to and got annoyed. Very annoyed. They got heavy at one point, and we got chased out.”
“The parallel universe guys realised we had a problem, packed our bags and drove us out of there at high speed. We weren’t really finished, but had to cross the state border before they injuncted the film, which could trap it in the courts for five years. Five years waiting for them to release the film, imagine.”
Knowing how to pick your battles, when to persist doggedly, and whose advice to trust are clearly key skills for anyone hoping to juggle executive expectations linked to huge sums of money with, on the other hand, the subtler concerns of good storytelling that are the reason you’re filming in the first place.
It’s surely no coincidence that Danny found himself drawn to a script in which just such a juggling act is played out. The film’s hero Jamal meets an endless stream of compromises and short-term setbacks, but never backs down in the long-term pursuit of his ultimate goal. Even when interrogated by the powers that be as to just what exactly he thinks he’s playing at.
