“Occasionally, you make a film that becomes, in this strange way, bigger than the sum of its parts,” says screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. “You never know why it happens.”
For Beaufoy, this happened with a modest British comedy about some naked blokes called The Full Monty. Yet so many attempts to repeat that success have been foiled by the intangibles of taste and timing. “I don’t think the audience knows what they’re looking for,” Beaufoy adds. “They just know what they want when they see it and it chimes somehow on some subconscious level.”
All indications suggest that Slumdog Millionaire is chiming very loudly. Scripted by Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle (casting director Loveleen Tandan shares credit as his Indian co-director), it’s the rags-to-riches tale of Jamal, a young man from the slums of Mumbai who becomes a national sensation by competing on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Wildly energetic and unabashedly larger-than-life, it’s a vibrant hybrid of western and eastern sensibilities — imagine a Bollywood romantic melodrama packaged in a thrilling visual style that owes more to past Boyle efforts like Trainspotting.
Interviewed in September at the Toronto International Film Festival — where the film won the Audience Award — the members of Slumdog Millionaire’s creative team are all chuffed that people have connected with the movie so strongly and so swiftly. Boyle is especially gratified that it’s going off like a rocket. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s really any other way to do it these days,” he says. “You either go off like a rocket or you vanish. About six weeks ago, we thought we were going to vanish.”
In fact, Slumdog Millionaire nearly fell victim to the industry turmoil that led to the closure of several of the so-called mini-majors. After Warner Brothers shuttered its Warner Independent Pictures subsidiary, Slumdog Millionaire was not picked up by its corporate parent. Instead, the studio went looking for another distributor willing to share the cost of the release. One of the few mini-majors in good health (the $143 million U.S. take for Juno didn’t hurt), Fox Searchlight stepped in to spare the film from an uncertain fate.
Boyle can understand why the movie’s original U.S. backer might have felt there were barriers to success in North America — the subtitles, for one. Yet he was also surprised, seeing as the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? angle gives Slumdog Millionaire an obvious hook. “Whether you like the show or not,” he says, “the reason it’s successful is because it touches a nerve. It is that idea of somebody from nowhere being able to amass a dream beyond expectation, in front of your eyes. Ironically, of course, it’s not money [Jamal] is after.”
Nor was it ever supposed to be, Beaufoy having re-fashioned the movie’s original source — Vikay Swarup’s novel Q&A — as a love story. “Money as a motivator in films doesn’t do it for me,” the writer admits. “In the book, [Jamal] becomes a very rich man. I thought, ‘Do I care? Am I really happy for him, that he started off in poverty and now he’s driving a Bentley? Do I feel utterly moved by that story?’ No, I don’t. If he starts as a very poor man who loses this girl and finds her again and they’re in love, yeah, I’m moved by that.”
The sturdy framework provided by the quiz-show angle and the love story allows Boyle the freedom to take viewers in directions that are more unexpected. In the process, he provides a remarkably vivid portrait of modern Mumbai. His imagination fuelled by his father’s stories about being stationed there in the Second World War, Boyle was excited at the chance to explore Mumbai. “I never tired of it,” he says. “I would go off on my days off and film either with the second unit or on my own with this little camera — I couldn’t stop. They had to drag me away in the end. If there’d been any money left, I would’ve stayed and kept filming.”
Though the recent attacks on Mumbai inevitably lend the film an air of poignancy — the train station where the exuberant closing dance number takes place was the site of an attack — Slumdog Millionaire remains remarkably successful at capturing the city’s vitality. What’s more, Beaufoy says the opportunity to work in India and create a truly Indian story was a boon for “all us slightly reserved Brits.”
“It allowed us all to go a lot further in our ambition, really,” he adds. “And we could go back to the simplicity of epic storytelling, which is so great. It’s so lovely to do that without thinking, ‘Oh dear, it’s all this bloody melodrama — quick, pare it all back!’ It’s what I have to do most of the time, but that seems very tired.”
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