“Just occasionally, you make a film that becomes, in this strange way, bigger than the sum of its parts,” says Simon Beaufoy. “You never know why it happens.”

For Beaufoy, this happened once before with another movie he’d written, a modest British comedy about some naked blokes called The Full Monty. Yet so many attempts to repeat that success — whether by Beaufoy or by others — have been foiled by the intangibles of taste and timing. “I don’t think the audience knows what they’re looking for,” adds Beaufoy. “They just know what they want when they see it and it chimes somehow on some subconscious level.”
Every indication would suggest that Slumdog Millionaire is chiming very loudly. What’s more, the story the movie presents onscreen is mirrored by its own tale of triumph in the face of film-biz adversity. It’s shaping up to be a rare success for a segment of the movie business that could use the good news.

Scripted by Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle (casting director Loveleen Tandan shares credit as his Indian co-director), Slumdog Millionaire is about two brothers from the slums of Mumbai, one of whom grows up to be a national sensation by competing on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Wildly energetic and unabashedly larger-than-life, it’s a vibrant hybrid of Western and Eastern sensibilities — imagine a Bollywood romantic melodrama packaged in a thrilling visual style that owes more to past Boyle efforts like Trainspotting or 28 Days Later. No wonder the movie has already emerged as the consensus favourite of the fall festival circuit, winning the People’s Choice Award at TIFF.



Interviewed in town in September, Slumdog Millionaire’s two lead actors and its creative team are chuffed that audiences have connected with the movie so strongly and so swiftly. Each of them point to the story’s universal appeal. “I think it’s the fact that so many people can relate to it,” says Freida Pinto.

A 24-year-old model-turned-actor from Mumbai (formerly and still colloquially known as Bombay), Pinto plays the adult version of Latika, the girl who grows up with the brothers and eventually comes between them. Pinto rightly calls Slumdog Millionaire “the story of an underdog.”

“They love that whole aspect,” says Dev Patel, the 18-year-old Londoner who plays Jamal, the more sensitive brother who becomes the film’s intrepid hero and Millionaire contestant. “It’s endearing.”

“And the fact that he’s on a game show and is going to win the big bucks,” adds Pinto, “it’s everyone’s dream!”

Director Danny Boyle is especially gratified that his new movie is going off like a rocket. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s really any other way to do it these days,” he says. “You either go off like a rocket or you vanish. About six weeks ago, we thought we were going to vanish.”

Slumdog Millionaire did nearly fall victim to the industry turmoil that led to the recent closure of several of the so-called “mini-majors.” These are the companies responsible for the majority of Oscar-worthy movies and just about any other film targeted at viewers over the age of 14. Though the “indie” boom spurred by Pulp Fiction over a decade ago was bound to end someday, none of this bodes well for moviegoers who would like to have multiplex options that don’t involve caped crusaders or talking Chihuahuas.

After Warner Brothers shuttered its Warner Independent Pictures subsidiary (the one that brought you Good Night, and Good Luck., among others), Slumdog Millionaire was not picked up by its corporate parent. Instead, the studio went looking for another distributor willing to share the cost of the release, an indication of Warners’ meagre enthusiasm. One of the few mini-majors in good health (the US$143 million take for Juno didn’t hurt), Fox Searchlight stepped in to spare it from an uncertain fate.

Boyle can understand why the movie’s original US backer might’ve felt there were barriers to success in North America, such as the Hindi subtitles. Yet he was also surprised, seeing as the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? angle gives Slumdog Millionaire such an obvious hook. “Whether you like the show or not,” he says, “the reason it’s successful is because it touches a nerve. It is that idea of somebody from nowhere being able to amass a dream beyond expectation in front of your eyes. Ironically, of course, it’s not money [Jamal] is after.”

Nor was it ever supposed to be, Beaufoy having refashioned the movie’s original source — Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A — as a love story. “Money as a motivator in films doesn’t do it for me,” the writer admits. “In the book, [Jamal] becomes a very rich man. I thought, ‘Do I care? Am I really happy for him, that he started off in poverty and now he’s driving a Bentley? Do I feel utterly moved by that story?’ No, I don’t. If he starts as a very poor man who loses this girl and finds her again and they’re in love, yeah, I’m moved by that.”

The sturdy framework provided by the quiz-show angle and the love story allows Boyle the freedom to take viewers in unexpected directions. In the process, he provides a remarkably vivid portrait of modern Mumbai. “There’s something about it that’s unchangeable yet everything is changing all the time,” says the director. “It’s this massive contradiction.”
Pinto believes this outsider succeeds at getting inside the place. “It’s really the best Bombay ever in a movie,” she says. “I think it will shatter a lot of people’s misconceptions.”

His imagination fuelled by his father’s stories about being stationed there in WWII, the Manchester-born Boyle was excited at the chance to explore Mumbai. “I never tired of it,” he says. “I would go off on my days off and film either with the second unit or my own with this little camera — I couldn’t stop. They had to drag me away in the end. If there’d been any money left, I would’ve stayed and kept filming.”

With its hyper-capitalist excess, chaotic streets and extremes of rich and poor, Mumbai proves to be ideally suited to the vigorously kinetic visual sensibility preferred by Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.

Beaufoy readily concurs. “Danny in Bombay is a marriage made in heaven,” he says. “The more difficult it got, the bigger his grin was. There were times I thought we’d all be killed and he’d be like, ‘This is great!’ He loves the energy and intensity of being there. He really captured all that. And the slightly operatic nature of the story suits his vision of the world.”

The opportunity to work in India and create a truly Indian story was a boon for “all us slightly reserved Brits,” says Beaufoy. “It allowed us all to go a lot further in our ambition, really. And we could go back to the simplicity of epic storytelling, which is so great. It’s so lovely to do that without thinking, ‘Oh dear, it’s all this bloody melodrama — quick, pare it all back!’ It’s what I have to do most of the time. But that seems very tired.”

Instead, the result is a film whose depth, breadth and sheer momentum make it largely irresistible, especially to viewers who’ve come to share the diminished expectations of industry folk. “It’s got that mixture, hasn’t it?” says Patel. “It’s got the pace, it’s got the action, it’s got the comedy — it’s got everything.”

He’s not the first actor to stump his wares, but for once, audiences are apt to agree.