Danny Boyle Interview

Danny Boyle once went trainspotting, but 28 days later he was scratching his head about what to do next.

Surely, the famed British actor could do better than making a rags-to-riches story with Who Wants to be a Millionaire? as the movie’s premise, right?

“The agent told me it was a movie about Who Wants to be a Millionaire?,” Boyle candidly told Buzzine. “I just thought, I don’t want to do a movie about this.”

Alas, leave it up to Boyle to come to terms with such a far-fetched plot and turn it into a film worthy of Oscar consideration.

“The only reason I even read the script is because Simon (Beaufoy)’s name [was] on it,” he added. “The absolute honest truth: I was lost after ten pages.”

Once he found himself, Boyle translated the words he read into a visual masterpiece in Slumdog Millionaire, set for limited release just in time for awards season.

A feel-good story doubling as a global adventure, Boyle relies on an all-Indian cast to deliver a message of love and hope to fans worldwide. In the process, we meet an underdog who we cannot help but root for.

“For some reason, I knew, after reading 10 or 15 pages, this was going to make it,” Boyle added.

His filmmaking sense may have spoken volumes to him in the solace of a couch and a quiet room, but what Boyle brings to the movie-goer on the silver screen is a fairytale story spoken through the lives of three children living in the slums of Mumbai.

“This is classic Indian story-telling,” Boyle said, referring to several powerful scenes and climaxes that differ from American or British filmmaking.

Throughout Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle interplays the gritty life of children in the filthiest of slums, balancing the good with the bad.

“I’m a very positive person — very optimistic about stuff,” he said about the film’s tone. “I am a bit of a dreamer, in a way.

“Although, you choose subjects where you have to be brutal,” Boyle added about the range of emotion portrayed by the film’s characters.

Specifically, Slumdog Millionaire is broken up into three parts, as it follows the lives of two brothers and a girl growing up in the slums. In his portrayal, Boyle depicts the two brothers against each other through adolescence and into adulthood — one taking the role of hope and promise, while the other travels down a path of crime, debauchery, and despair.

All the while, a young girl with a mind of her own grows more demure as a teenager before sinking into submission as a woman.

Despite transitioning between past and present at breakneck speed, Boyle manages to infuse a sense of positivism that is far greater than his sense of optimism.

“If you go to India -– certainly in Mumbai -– some of the things you see are shocking,” he said about the all things negative, which he tried to capture in Slumdog Millionaire. “Yet what I love about India is, despite that, it has the most amazing spirit. It’s a very open, positive country.”

Visiting India for the first time to film on location, including various scenes in Mumbai’s largest slum, Boyle did all he could to portray the reality of India in spite of not-so-great conditions.

“I don’t think of them as grim; I think of them as honest,” Boyle said about capturing the reality of Mumbai’s slums. “You have to get your head around the mental horror of it. If you are going to tell a story about the people who live somewhere, you have to get inside their heads.”

Get inside their heads he did –- throughout the film, the movie-goer is reminded of the shady aspects of Mumbai’s underworld, yet the optimistic Boyle does so for a purpose.

“I do believe in mining hope out of [telling a grim story],” he pointedly said. “As a country, India has a big heart. You can feel the heart [throughout the movie]. There is no embarrassment of emotion.”

Interestingly enough, Boyle was not sure he could mine hope out of the United States.

“I have to be honest – I didn’t think it would work in America,” he quietly told Buzzine with a tilted head. “We lost the distribution here at one point.”

His head perked up, however, when he told Buzzine how things eventually worked out. Specifically, despite one-third of the dialogue in Hindi, an all-Indian cast, and a premise based upon a has-been game show, Boyle believes two ever-present themes carry the day for American audiences.

“We brought it here and started playing it. One thing is the underdog -– the ideal that a guy from nowhere who is unqualified but has a dream — that is very deep in the psyche, and you can feel it and overcomes the barriers [of language and culture].”

Getting over the hump of filming his first Bollywood-themed movie –- there is even a Bollywood dance number, references to the industry’s biggest names, and a cast member considered a legend of Indian cinema –- Boyle definitely sees an open door for future projects in the world’s largest movie industry.

“I’d like to make a thriller there,” Boyle revealed, referencing the interplay and commingling between gangsters, corrupt police, Bollywood’s biggest stars, and members of Indian royalty.

“It is a great city for a thriller. There is a feverish sense of opportunity and the bad side of humanity comes out, and there is some nobility there as well.”