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You asked MIA to do a song for the film?
We asked her if we could use “Paper Planes”, and she watched the
movie and she was very generous, gave me very smart notes. I said we
were going to do the music with A.R. Rahman, and when she was growing
up, he was one of her heroes, so she sang on one of his tracks.
Danny Boyle on ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
and the Smell of India
By Ben Barna
November 13,
2008
Directory Danny
Boyle is most famous for his film Trainspotting, but he's had a varied career
otherwise -- from scheming twentysomethings to alarmingly ambulatory zombies to
dreamy sci-fi. Now with Slumdog Millionaire,
he tackles the comic-sweet-tragic story of a dirt-poor Indian teenager
in Mumbai who finagles his way onto a game show, all for love. Here's
Boyle on shooting in Mumbai, the range of international odor, and what
foodstuffs make the best simulated feces.
What was the most shocking
thing that you saw while there?
Whoa, I think it’s pretty much the same for everybody—when you see a
beggar nearing your car and they knock on the window, and you can
clearly see that their hands have been deliberately cut off. You have
to get your head around it really, I mean you’re overwhelmed by it, but
that kind of action is just pointless because it’s not about you, it
has something to do with what it’s like for him, really. And you have
to get into the mindset there, like that guy, the way he deals with it
is that he regards that as his destiny. That’s the way that destiny has
dealt to him. And it’s a very profound feeling out there. Destiny is
quite a casual concept with us. It’s a very different concept there,
and it helps them deal with stuff like that and that.
What’s the smell like?
The smell of India is unique, and of course that’s the one thing
you definitely can’t do on film. It’s a mixture of humanity, which is
our excrement, and saffron, and then excrement again. It’s the most
extraordinary smell ... you can’t get it anywhere else. I think one of
the reasons is the extremes of life. Actually, you realize what we do
in the West, is that the extremes, we tend to kind of section off, to
give ourselves some comfort zones. There are always extremes
everywhere, but we tend to section them off, and there they just
co-exist the whole time at their most extreme, and the smell is an
example of it—it’s so sweet and so awful, all at the same time.
What about the food over there, what do people eat, what did you eat. Is it
safe?
Oh God yeah, you’ve got to be a bit careful, but it’s amazing food.
If you’re a vegetarian, you could not go to a better place in the
world. I’m not a vegetarian, but it is wonderful, and there’s more
choice there than anywhere, because it’s a vegetarian nation, although
they do eat meats. That food is extraordinary.
When you first got there, were you kind of overwhelmed with the scenery and how
much there was to shoot?
Yeah, you just kind of can’t stop. I had to be dragged away in the
end. In fact, the producer and all my crew went home, and I kept
shooting with the Indian crew, and then the producer just basically got
on a plane and shut all the bank accounts and that was it. And you only
get a bit of it, but if you’re lucky, you did it well.
When you’re walking the city streets, do you get a sense of the sheer density
of the population?
There are people everywhere. And the traffic’s chaotic, and the
infrastructure is not there, but despite that, it works. That’s what’s
interesting. You can spend your life trying to work that out, or you
can just accept that there is somehow a pattern that works. And you get
little glimpses of it occasionally, but most of the time, it’s
completely indecipherable. You can’t see it, I can’t see it, but you
trust it, and it will benefit you.
Is there a lot of crime?
No, not particularly. There is a lot of gangsterism, the gangsters
run the city in many ways; but in terms of casual crime, it feels like
a very safe place in many ways.
Has there ever been anywhere you’ve been that’s comparable to this?
No, you can’t compare. All those kind of things like, “What do you
compare it to?” or “Can you control it?” or understand it even, they’re
all slightly irrelevant, really. You have to just experience it I
think. If you enjoy it, it’s immeasurable what it does to you. It is a
bit hippie, and I was never a hippie—I was always a punk—but you do go
there to learn. You learn about yourself, and obviously about those of
us who occupy this planet. They always recycled in India, and we
recycle now, because we’re desperately trying to catch up with the fact
that we’re destroying the planet. But they’ve recycled forever in
India. It’s part of the whole way the nation is built. People throw
things away, but as they do it, there’s a whole other class of people
who pick those things up.
There’s a scene in the film where one of the characters jumps
into a pool of feces, and is covered in it for the rest of the scene.
So was it actually shit?
It’s the same thing we used in Trainspotting. It’s peanut butter and chocolate.
Was the child actor happy to be covered in that?
Yeah, he was great. Although, it’s not all that pleasant to be covered
in peanut butter and chocolate. He was just keen to get the scene over
with.
What’s the fundamental difference between life over there and life over here?
I think there isn’t any separation of anything. They don’t separate
things like we do. It’s all one. And that goes from the most extreme
horror and poverty, to the most outrageous wealth and affluence. And
they’re aware that destiny links them, and makes them inseparable. I
think what we’ve done, we’ve built these comfort zones for ourselves,
where we tend to separate ourselves from people, and it’s not a
question of crowding, it’s a question of attitude and mentality. They
believe they’re all in together really, for good and bad, and some
people get really bad hands, but they don’t think of it like it’s a bad
hand. They don’t regard it like that.
You asked MIA to do a song for the film?
We asked her if we could use “Paper Planes”, and she watched the
movie and she was very generous, gave me very smart notes. I said we
were going to do the music with A.R. Rahman, and when she was growing
up, he was one of her heroes, so she sang on one of his tracks.
