'It grabs you by the throat,' says Danny Boyle, whose film Slumdog Millionaire is leaving people breathless worldwide
'It grabs you by the throat,' says Danny Boyle, whose film Slumdog Millionaire is leaving people breathless worldwide
During the course of a recent interview by the poolside of the Bombay Marriot, I tried to present Danny Boyle with a pirated DVD of Slumdog Millionaire.
Piracy, I told him, has its own way of bestowing status on art. A bit like the pirated books sold at traffic lights: if you're part of the traffic light Top Five, you have a hit novel on your hands.
Danny squealed in mock outrage, "I can't accept it!"
(I asked him if he at least wanted to hold the DVD for a few seconds. He declined.)
Danny says he's tried to explain to his producers that they shouldn't be too perturbed by the mass scale piracy which has enabled thousands of Indians to see Slumdog before its been released he says he told them that piracy is an occupational hazard in a "technologically clever, literate country" like India.u00a0 He then went on to narrate an anecdote about a trip to Uzbekistan where someone in Tashkent asked him to sign a pirated copy of Trainspotting. He agreed. "I did it, I signed it," he said, with the horrified glee of a schoolboy.
India seems to have stoked his natural exuberance. In the words of one of his Indian associates, "India ne isko pagal kar diya hai".
What's led the maker of such cult classics as Trainspotting, a manic ride through the heroin subculture of Edinburgh, and 28 Days Later, a reworking of the zombie genre film, to Bombay?u00a0 Usually, he says, it starts with a book. With Trainspotting, he said it wasn't even the entire book (by the writer Irvine Welsh). It was the first page. Do you remember the first line, I ask. Without a pause, Danny intones, "The sweat was lashing off Sickboy's back."
With 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland, a regular Boyle collaborator, he says it was a scene which hooked him, of a man walking the streets of a deserted London. Boyle famously managed to shut down central London briefly for that shot. "Imagine doing that to Bombay", he said wistfully. And with Sunshine, another Boyle reworking of a genre (sci-fi), he says it was the idea: of eight men and women strapped to the back of a nuclear bomb, on their way to the sun.
With Slumdog, it wasn't so much Vikas Swarup's book, which he would read much later, but one image from the script which drew him in: Jamal erupting out of a puddle of shit clutching Amitabh Bachchan's autograph. Oddly, the companion book to Slumdog would turn out to be not so much Q & A, but Maximum City, which Boyle read when he was stationed in Bombay for a year shooting the film. He is full of admiration for Suketu Mehta. "You can see he has walked the streets for hours and hours."
Boyle says Bombay reminds of him of New York in the late seventies and early eighties, which acted as a catalyst for Martin Scorcese's early work. Bombay, he says, has got that same sense of a city on the boil, full of possibilities, "destroying and rebuilding itself" every minute. "It grabs you by the throat," he said, mimicking the action.
In Danny's words, Bombay offers the manic landscape suited to his school of 'extreme filmmaking'. "I found the city mesmerizing and that's all I try to do for two hours because you're only in there for two hours. I want to mesmerise you. I want to lock you in the film so that you can't breathe and then you come out breathless."
It also helped his Bombay orientation that Boyle sees himself as a bit of a, well, slumdog. He is of Irish origin, but grew up in the industrial north of England.
u00a0
'We are the b*st*rd Irish children of the North,' he said, just like the Gallagher brothers of the massively popular band Oasis, and the legendary punk musician Morrissey, to whom Boyle bears a passing resemblance. Boyle says growing up in the blighted urban wasteland of cities like Blackpool and Manchester demand a sense of black humour, often bordering on the politically offensive. You need that in city like Bombay, too, he says. Like the scene with Jamal and the autograph.
In the year or so he spent in Bombay, he met and befriended Indian filmmakers, like Shekhar Kapur, whose work he says he's always admired, and Anurag Kashyap. He liked Black Friday a lot. Let's do a film together, he told Anurag. Anurag seemed willing but for a reverse collaboration. "Here I am saying let's do a crime thriller set in Bombay, and Anurag wants to film a thriller novel set in Ireland!" So is Danny Boyle going to be denied an Indian jugalbandi? Perhaps not. As we make our way back from the interview, a glimmer of a solution presents itself.
u00a0
Inside of one of the Marriott's poolside cabanas, we run into the Bollywood director duo Abbas-Mustan, known as much for their perfectly coordinated all-white ensembles, white patent leather shoes included, as for their racy thrillers. I offered brief introductions. "Happy to meet you," said Abbas-Mustan. "Love your shoes," remarked Danny.
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The writer is managing editor, NDTV 24x7
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