Danny Boyle's two-decade-long filmmaking career has taken him to a number of exotic locales, from the back-room bathrooms of Scotland, to the beaches of Thailand, to the frozen reaches of outer space. So it's no surprise that the 52-year-old director of such contemporary classics as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later picked another vibrant setting for his eighth feature film, Slumdog Millionaire. Based on the novel Q & A by author Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire unfolds on the streets of Mumbai, India and moves at the same dizzying pace that defines 21st-century life in the teeming metropolis formerly known as Bombay.

The story follows Jamal (Dev Patel), a slum kid turned chai wallah (tea vendor) for a major cell-phone company, who wins a spot on the Indian edition of the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” game-show franchise. Although everyone in the audience—as well as the smarmy host—expects the low-caste boy to be sent home after the first question, Jamal shocks them all by making it to the final round. As we quickly learn, though, he's not some kind of secret genius. Rather, his good fortune is due to the fact that every single question he's asked on the show somehow relates to his incredible life story. Through flashbacks, we watch Jamal's evolution from a bratty "slumdog" to the young man in the million-rupee hot seat. As he grows up, so too does India, shaking off its Third World status and rushing headlong into its current economic boom.

Boyle says that those parallel coming-of-age narratives were one of the primary things that attracted him to the project. "India has a very young population and there's a lot of opportunities for them," he says on the phone from Los Angeles, where he's spending some time promoting the film in advance of its stateside release by Fox Searchlight on Nov. 12. "Capitalism works best when it’s expanding—it doesn't work so great when it’s contracting, which is what we're going through right now [in American and Britain]. There's an incredible amount of space in India to expand. In 50 years’ time, so much more of the world will be out there. And that's not me preaching, by they way. It feels like that when you're there—you can see it happening. They just declared they're going to the moon! On the one hand, you think, 'They haven't got any bloody toilets for half the people that live there, but they're going to the moon?' Those are the kinds of contradictions that exist there—these extraordinary, slightly irrational contradictions that define India as an extraordinary and bewildering place at the same time."

Unlike most of Boyle's features to date, Slumdog Millionaire was not a project he personally discovered or originated. That credit goes to Tessa Ross, head of Film4, the filmmaking arm of Britain's Channel 4 television broadcaster and the company behind such acclaimed features as 24 Hour Party People and This Is England. After securing the rights to Swarup's novel, she commissioned a script from Simon Beaufoy, best known for penning The Full Monty. When he turned in his screenplay, Ross made sure it found its way to Boyle's desk.

"As soon as I started Simon's script, I knew I was going to make it into a movie," he remembers. "His writing is very generous and inclusive and he had the dexterity to freely adapt the novel. The book is very rigid in its structure, but Simon weaved it across time, intercutting and interweaving the narrative. I hadn't read the book before reading the script and, in fact, I didn't read it until right before we started shooting. I picked it up thinking it might hold wonders that Simon had missed, but I realized straightaway what a great job he'd done adapting it."

After committing to the project, it didn't take long for Boyle to figure out how he wanted to make the movie...or, to be more accurate, how he didn't want to make the movie. "I'd previously done a film in Thailand [2000's The Beach] and I didn't do it the right way," he explains. "I took a huge crew and when you do that, you're kind of like an invading army. There are so many of you and you've got so much money compared to the local population. So I decided to make this one differently. I took a small crew of only ten people over with me, thinking it would be better to slip inside rather than invade. Of course, it's easier to do that in India because there are so many great Bollywood crews there. My first AD [Raj Acharya] and my co-director [Loveleen Tandan]—who was the casting director originally—were both locals and without them, it would have been a quarter of the film it is."



Like almost every Westerner who visits India for the first time, Boyle found the experience overwhelming, demanding and ultimately addictive. "They had to drag me away at the end of the shoot," he says, laughing. "I loved it. Not all of the ten people I took with me did, but I had little patience for them—I personally regarded it as their fault! They went in with the wrong attitude and weren't prepared to learn. India is extraordinary and what you can learn about yourself there is wonderful.

“Going in, I expected to be recognized more—not me personally [as a filmmaker], but me as a Brit, because we only left in 1947. Simon told me that a few years ago they still did revere the old colonial [traditions], but now they don't even see Britain anymore. Their economy is compared to China, Russia, Vietnam, Brazil...the emerging economies. So that's where they see themselves.

"That said, there are certainly a lot of connections between Mumbai and America and Britain," Boyle continues. "The city is often linked with New York as an experience. When I first went to New York in the ’80s, every molecule in the air was the city. You could smell it, taste it, touch it; it was just there, vibrating constantly. Mumbai is completely like that. There was a book I carried with me every day [during production] called Maximum City, which is by a guy who grew up in Bombay until he was 16 and then went to New York to be educated. He moved his family back to Bombay when he was 30 and the book is about his dual perspectives of the two cities—it links New York and Mumbai in a really vivid way. Mumbai obviously is a very different place visually, but it's an exciting place to be and, like New York, if you make a boring film there you deserve to be drowned. There's not very much about the place that's boring."

The hectic pace of life in Mumbai (Boyle describes it as “a city in fast-forward") is reflected in Slumdog's hyperkinetic camerawork and editing style, which hurtles the narrative along, barely ever pausing for a breath. And even though the film shares little in common with a typical Bollywood production in terms of style or content—save for a lavish closing-credits dance number—Boyle says that he learned a lot from working at the epicenter of India's vibrant film industry.

"There’s an exuberance and love of storytelling in Bollywood films," he explains. "They love big heart moments, which we [in the West] tend to regard as melodramatic. Also, films are very sporadically made over there. There are a lot of them, but they are fragmented because of the stars' availability and schedules. So the coherence of the whole thing is less important, whereas we put great stock in coherence.

“It's very funny what they think about us and how we see their country actually. My crew often said to me, 'There will be lot of cows wandering around your film, we know that.' So I thought to myself, 'Right, I'll make fucking sure there aren't any cows in this film!' And actually there are a couple in the background because they're everywhere, but you only get a glimpse of them!"

With Slumdog in the can and already generating end-of-the-year awards buzz, Boyle is in the process of searching for another filmmaking adventure to embark upon. Initially he hoped to direct his first animated film, but that movie recently fell apart, leaving the one-picture-at-a-time director with no backup project to jumpstart. Still, the extended time off does give Boyle the opportunity to devote more time to what may be his favorite part of the filmmaking process: research. "That's one of the perks of the job, dipping into something you don't know. People would give their right arm to do stuff like that. It's like journalism—you guys get to do different stories and dip in and out of things. In my case, I read about India for several years and before that I was reading about outer space. It's a privilege, really."