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138 Slumdog Millionaire: Danny Boyle Interview Catherine Bray/2008 From catherinebray.wordpress.com. Originally published in 4Talent magazine in December 2008. Reprinted with permission. Not that many interviews begin with a globally respected film director spontaneously reassuring their interviewer regarding the current state of the economy. And not too many interviews also incorporate a debate on how and where the women of Indian slums manage to dispose of their excrement in such total secrecy compared to their unabashed menfolk, who think nothing of shitting in the street. But then Danny Boyle, comfortably placed within Britain’s top five finest living directors for the best part of a decade, isn’t someone you would ever call a predictable interviewee. “You’ll be fine,” he assures me, having opened the conversation with small talk about the dire state of the economy. “How old are you? Oh, you’ll be fine. I remember there was a crisis the first time we bought a proper house. We bought it at the top of the property boom for£189,000, and literally the next week the market crashed and it was suddenly worth, like, £114,000, and it was negative equity. Awful.” As ever with Danny, the world of film is never more than a sentence away, and true to form he segues swiftly into reminiscence: “I remember meeting Anthony Minghella at the time—late eighties, early nineties, just after this crash—and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it; you’ll be fine.’ He was right.” Economy dealt with, time to tackle the really big issues. Time to talk crap, literally. The reason Danny has shite firmly on the brain when we meet for an hour’s chat at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden is that his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, is partly set precisely where the catherine bray / 2008 139 name might suggest: the slums of Mumbai. Where, Danny is keen to convey: “You do get shit all over you. There’s nowhere to shit; people shit everywhere. Although you never see the women shitting. I was there a year, on and off, and for eight months full-time. You see men doing it all the time. Men and boys. All the time—and you have to get your head around that. But you never see women.” He pauses to allow the mystery to fully sink in. “There were all these rumors: ‘Oh, they get up in the night’—but I was up in the night, and I never saw them. There are these little plastic bags everywhere, tied up very neatly. It must be that; that’s the only logical explanation.” You’ll hear many directors pontificate about getting their hands dirty and bonding as a team, but most of them don’t have contending with the open toilets of Mumbai in mind. Yet without sounding pretentious, Danny manages to turn talk of the most ignoble of circumstances into a subtle point about a working system in which, despite the inherently hierarchical nature of feature film production, basic equalities are acknowledged . “You can’t get all squeamish about it. We all do it; we’ve just got a very elaborate way of disposing of it over here. It happened to most of us there—it didn’t happen to me, I was very lucky—but it happened that most of us were caught short at some point.” “Your British crew are mortified that they’ve just had to go in front of you, but there’s nowhere to go. Your Indian crew just look at you and shrug. I remember Thomas the gaffer being caught short; we were on this little island, nothing there. But it was kind of liberating, because we’re so guarded, so private, about that sort of thing in the West, and yet we all do it.” Whether down to the defecatory egalitarianism of its crew or not, one of the great things about Slumdog Millionaire is that although it successfully holds a magnifying glass to the underbelly of India’s slums, it doesn’t patronize its subject, or seek to suggest that just because your street is your toilet that your life must likewise be a pile of crap. Like Charles Dickens did well over a century before, writer Simon Beaufoy [The Full Monty] captures in his script for Slumdog Millionaire something of the haphazard, teeming reality of an enormous hive of a city in flux, changing faster than it has at probably any other point...

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