Slumdog Millionaire

[MacGuffin]

Danny Boyle to direct 'Slumdog'
Celador, Film4 greenlight Mumbai-set pic
Source: Variety

Celador Films and Film4 have greenlit Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," with Warner Independent Pictures and Pathe in advanced negotiations to take domestic and international rights, respectively.

Based on true events, script by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") concerns an illiterate street kid from Mumbai who wins the jackpot on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Brit newcomer Dev Patel, who appeared in the Channel 4 teen series "Skins," has been cast in the lead role.

Pic will shoot in Mumbai beginning Nov. 5, fully financed by Celador and Film4. Celador's co-managing director Christian Colson is producing, with Celador founder Paul Smith and Film4 topper Tessa Ross as exec producers.

Boyle will work with regular collaborators, including cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, alongside an Indian crew.

Boyle's previous films with Film4 include "A Life Less Ordinary," "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave."

Celador was the original TV production company behind "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

Smith subsequently launched the film arm, run by Colson, with the resources to co-finance its own projects. "Slumdog Millionaire" will be its fourth move, following "Dirty Pretty Things," "The Descent" and "Separate Lies."

[Ravi]

Danny Boyle to direct 'Slumdog'

[Ravi]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7615211.stm

Slumdog wins film festival prize

British director Danny Boyle has won the Toronto Film Festival's main prize for Slumdog Millionaire.

The People's Choice Award, voted for by film fans, is regarded as an early indicator of success at the Oscars.

The film, starring Dev Patel, charts the life of a poor boy's rise to fortune living in the Indian slums.

Boyle, 51, received critical acclaim for previous gritty works such as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and the zombie-horror film 28 Days Later.

Cash prize

Previous winners of the Canadian award include the London gangster film Eastern Promises by acclaimed director David Cronenberg.

Patel plays orphan Jamal, who appears on the Indian version of the hit TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Originally, Boyle said he had hoped for an all Bollywood cast.

However, that was not possible as local Indian actors "didn't look enough like losers" for the main role of poor Jamal.

"It's a great underdog story," he said.

"In Bollywood if you want to be a young actor breaking into the system, you have to go to the gym for six hours a day to bulk up. I needed a very average-looking guy."

Bollywood star Anil Kapoor also stars in the movie, along with newcomer Freida Pinto.

Winners of the award are also presented with $15,000 (about £8,400).

[Ravi]

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.


Release Date: November 12th, 2008 (limited)

Starring: Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto 

Directed by: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan 

Premise: The story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

[MacGuffin]

Danny Boyle rises to challenges of 'Slumdog Millionaire'
The director's well-regarded film, made in Mumbai, India, features Dev Patel and Irfan Khan.
By John Horn; Los Angeles Times

Danny Boyle wasn't yet done with the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal was done with him.

The British director needed to grab a few more shots inside the Indian landmark for his new movie "Slumdog Millionaire," a drama about the remarkable life story of an orphan from Mumbai's slums. Yet the production was no longer welcome. "The people who were helping us there," Boyle says, "didn't help us."

Some directors would have moved on and made do with what they had in the can. Others might have scouted another location. A few might have called up a special effects house to re-create the palace in a computer. Yet Boyle rarely has followed custom, and the outside-the-box thinking that has yielded his eclectic filmography also helped Boyle and his "Slumdog Millionaire" team conjure up a novel solution -- they sent in a fake documentary crew to get the footage.

"I can't remember if they posed as Indian or German or a mixture of both," Boyle says of the "Slumdog Millionaire" team sent to the Taj Mahal. The trick was picking production members who hadn't been there the first time so they wouldn't be recognized by security. "We had to do a little bit of stealth," Boyle says.

Boyle ultimately got what he needed, yet that was hardly the only impediment he faced in making the movie for half a year in and around Mumbai, India, one of the world's most populous cities.

While casting the film, Boyle and his Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan, decided that the movie's first third should be in Hindi, rather than mostly English, jarring news for his French and American backers who knew that foreign-language films don't usually perform very well at the box office. Later, running low on funds, he had to abandon a planned monsoon sequence. And then, just as filming wrapped, U.S. distributor Warner Independent Pictures was shut down by Warner Bros., and the parent studio briefly considered releasing "Slumdog Millionaire" straight to video before Fox Searchlight came to the film's rescue.

At its heart, the film is a story of fate, and just as Boyle and his crew were swept up by Mumbai's whatever-it-takes spirit, the film's optimistic story line somehow altered "Slumdog Millionaire's" destiny. "If you trust it," Boyle is fond of saying about working in Mumbai, "it will come back to you."

And that's exactly what has happened to the movie. "Slumdog Millionaire" not only found a new distributor (Fox Searchlight, which is releasing the film Wednesday, is sharing costs and proceeds with Warner Bros.) but also is one of the holiday movie period's best-reviewed titles.

After premiering at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day, "Slumdog Millionaire" also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the festival's People's Choice Award, an honor previously bestowed on "American Beauty" and "Chariots of Fire."

For those familiar with Boyle's filmography, it's not an entirely surprising outcome, given the 52-year-old director's remarkable artistic range. He has made a zombie flick ("28 Days Later"), a children's fantasy ("Millions"), a sci-fi thriller ("Sunshine"), two big star vehicles (Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Beach" and Cameron Diaz's "A Life Less Ordinary") and an often horrific, often hilarious, sad, sick and ultimately impossible-to-categorize drug story ("Trainspotting").

As varied as all of those films have been, they are inherently united by Boyle's fanciful vision, unexpected images in unexpected places: babies crawling on ceilings, houses materializing out of thin air, flesh-eating monsters running like Olympic sprinters.

"I always try to make films intense -- intensely pleasurable or intensely frightening or intensely joyful," Boyle says. "Intensity is something I go for. That's how I judge things."

There's plenty of intensity in the R-rated "Slumdog Millionaire," too, including a few brief but troubling scenes of torture, a glimpse of teenage prostitution and some terrible cruelty to homeless children. But amid the heartache there's something else that's not always so obvious in Boyle's other movies: naturalism.

Even though "Slumdog Millionaire" is a work of fiction, it feels so consistently real that some early audience members are convinced it's based on a true story.

Freely adapted by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") from Vikas Swarup's novel "Q & A," "Slumdog Millionaire" tracks the life of Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan living in Mumbai's sprawling slums, in which half of the city's 16 million residents live. As a child, Jamal (played as a teen by Dev Patel) meets Latika (played as a teen by Freida Pinto), a fellow Indian street urchin.

Jamal's childhood travels are filled with memorable encounters, not all of them pleasant. Those experiences shape Jamal into a romantic dreamer determined to be reunited with Latika and a savant possessing a wealth of seemingly inconsequential pop culture knowledge.

When Jamal appears as a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," his trivia database helps him last much longer than anyone -- including a police interrogator (Irfan Khan) and the show's host (Anil Kapoor) -- can believe.

Soon after Boyle contemplated directing the movie, he traveled to Mumbai to consider filming there. "I thought very early after I arrived, 'You have to do this,' " Boyle says of how he was transformed by the city's manic liveliness.

"Some people find that appalling and rush back to the hotel and book the first flight they can out of there. It's an assault. The whole thing -- people, smell, temperature, dirt, atmosphere, the air, the water, the danger -- 'Don't drink that! Don't touch that! Don't eat there.' It's exciting. Everybody is contributing an energy to the place, everybody is throwing something into the pot."

To appreciate the area's essence and to capture it on cameras were, of course, very different challenges. But Boyle had a plan.

Rather than arrive as an imperialist interloper, Boyle brought along just a few British department heads, and made a point of hiring heavily from Indian's filmmaking ranks. Largely because the film's characters are children, most of its actors were local neophytes.

But it wasn't just in casting (or in having the youngest actors speak Hindi, or in sneaking into the Taj Mahal) that Boyle achieved a distinctive realism.

Where Swarup's novel was episodic, Beaufoy's screenplay created what Boyle calls "fluid time," in which the divisions between present and past -- the film cuts back across more than a decade in time -- are almost indistinct. That same compression between now and then is evident in "Slumdog Millionaire's" contemporary scenes, which cut between the game show stage and a police interrogation room. Even though Jamal is in both places, it almost feels as if the scenes are unfolding simultaneously.

"The experience that I wanted to have was that everything would feel present day, even though some of it is 10 years ago," Boyle says. "The most important thing was that you were living it right now."

So when the game show's host asks Latika on the phone what her name is, Boyle cuts back to when she introduced herself to Jamal at age 7. "And you get this feeling of destiny," Boyle says. "Normally, in a film, you can never do that. I've certainly never been as free, editing-wise, as I've been on this, to go back in time."

When Boyle does travel to the past, he doesn't give the audience the usual clues: There aren't period cars or different clothes. "I didn't want them to have a different look, because I thought that would just be too tiresome."

Boyle and his team also realized it would be impossible. "There's not a lot of nostalgia," Boyle says, "because India is very hard to control. To do a proper period film in India, to obey the details of the period, would be an absolute nightmare. So we ignored all that."

As much for authenticity as for budget (the film cost $15 million), Boyle populated his film's backgrounds with local non-actors. When a young Jamal and his friends are chased by police through Mumbai's slums, the frame is filled with its real residents, not hired extras.

To capture the city's dynamism, Boyle often filmed with three different types of cameras, including a Canon still camera that can shoot 11 frames per second and deliver incredibly high-resolution pictures that are blended into the film.

"A lot of our film is about memory, recalling things, the way images are burned on your mind," Boyle says. "So we would use that camera for key moments, like the image of Latika, when Jamal loses her at a train station, because the image is burned on his mind."

Boyle's last film, the critical and commercial washout "Sunshine," was as austere a movie as Boyle has made. For a year of post-production, Boyle often worked with just a handful of special effects technicians and editors, working toward something he called "very exact and precise." His new film, Boyle says, couldn't be more different.

"India is the exact opposite of exact and precise," he says. "And none of the filming is very exact or precise. It's a dash, really. And by doing it that way, you might be lucky enough to get a bit of genuine India, or genuine Mumbai. I'd be surprised if I saw a very controlled film about Mumbai that really caught the city. It just doesn't work that way."

[modage]

Based on true events, script by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") concerns an illiterate street kid from Mumbai who wins the jackpot on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"

this is not based on true events. 

SPOILERS!
the little kid is really really cute.

END SPOILERS

city of millions

[bonanzataz]

i went tonight at the angelika to a sold out show with an audience that seemed to love it. i walked out with about 40 minutes to go to see the paris hilton musical instead. my friends that stayed in slumdog told me how it ended. i'm confident that i made the right decision.

[JG]

its pretty bad.

[cinemanarchist]

I didn't think it was terrible but it's clearly not worthy of half the praise it is receiving. I would have probably enjoyed it to a greater degree if people hadn't been shoving it's merits down my throat for months now.

[©brad]

i went tonight at the angelika to a sold out show with an audience that seemed to love it. i walked out with about 40 minutes to go to see the paris hilton musical instead. my friends that stayed in slumdog told me how it ended. i'm confident that i made the right decision.

hahah we might have crossed paths. i tried to go to the 5:20 but it was sold out.

[elpablo]

Got to attend a free screening last night where Danny Boyle spoke afterwards.

I'm getting bored with how hard it is to impress a lot of you, but if I posted here enough, you guys would probably get bored with how easy it is to impress me. So, oh well. That said, I was pretty impressed by this film. Yeah, it has a pretty typical story with a pretty typical ending where the guy gets the girl, but it's told in a such an interesting and engrossing way.Of course you know how it's going to end. It doesn't matter.

Someone last night asked Boyle about his decision to shoot on a small video format instead of film, and Boyle talked about how he didn't just want to "stare at India," he wanted to be in India and to show us India, and that's one thing that this film accomplishes very well.

[cinemanarchist]

Got to attend a free screening last night where Danny Boyle spoke afterwards.

I'm getting bored with how hard it is to impress a lot of you, but if I posted here enough, you guys would probably get bored with how easy it is to impress me. So, oh well. That said, I was pretty impressed by this film. Yeah, it has a pretty typical story with a pretty typical ending where the guy gets the girl, but it's told in a such an interesting and engrossing way.Of course you know how it's going to end. It doesn't matter.

Someone last night asked Boyle about his decision to shoot on a small video format instead of film, and Boyle talked about how he didn't just want to "stare at India," he wanted to be in India and to show us India, and that's one thing that this film accomplishes very well.

I agree that Boyle's direction ratchets this film up quite a few notches but the script was so lackluster that there just wasn't so far for it to go.

[samsong]

that this is such a celebrated movie is confusing and disconcerting.  i'm taking it as a sign of the apocalypse. 

[cinemanarchist]

that this is such a celebrated movie is confusing and disconcerting.  i'm taking it as a sign of the apocalypse. 

Nah, Juno was a sign of the apocalypse...this is just a shitty movie year. Not to say that there aren't droves of better movies than this one out there.