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145 Interview: Danny Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire Ambrose Heron/2009 From FILMdetail.com, January 8, 2009. Reprinted with permission. Transcribed by Brent Dunham. FD: Slumdog Millionaire is a new movie that’s out this week and we’re joined by the director, Danny Boyle. Danny, thanks for being here today . DB: Pleasure. Thanks for having us. FD: Okay, now, I last spoke to you when Sunshine came out and you told me your next film was going to be about a kid on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and it was only afterwards that I thought, “What’s that going to be? Is he doing a Bollywood movie? What’s going on?” And I saw the film at the London Film Festival and I was really blown away by it and it all kind of made sense but, for people coming new to the film this weekend on its U.K. release, tell us a bit about the story and how you got attached to the project. DB: Well, it’s got this fantastic premise: it’s about a slum kid, the “slumdog ” of the title, and he goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And it is the biggest cash prize in the world, relative to the standard of living. I mean it’s an enormous amount of money that’s offered, dangled in front of a very poor country, and he starts to answer all these questions and he gets every single question right, to his astonishment, and to theirs. So much so that they, actually, before the final question, they take him away and try and torture him into confession that he’s cheated because they imagine he’s just tried to hijack the money. He has not, in fact. In fact, the reason he’s on the show has nothing to do with the money, it’s to do with something else entirely, which is he’s got this girl who he has loved and lost in this 146 danny boyle: inter views chaos of Mumbai and all he knows is that she watches this show. And he figures if he gets on the show and stays in the chair long enough, she’ll see him and they can get back together again. So, that’s actually a very pure reason, at the heart of it, which has nothing to do with finance, to do with money, to do with the glamour, the glory, the fame of television, you know? FD: It’s a fascinating film to watch because there’s so many different elements to it. Let’s start off with the script, which is adapted from a novel called Q &A by Simon Beaufoy, who most people might know wrote The Full Monty. It’s a wonderful jigsaw puzzle of a script that crisscrosses between different timeframes, and the first ten minutes of this movie, I was like, “Whoa. What’s going on here?” Because we see the main kid of the title, who is played by Dev Patel, but we also see him earlier in his life. Was that always the intention to sort of move around these different time zones? DB: It’s got this wonderful fluid sense of time, so they are effectively flashbacks but you don’t feel like you’re watching a flashback movie. It feels like The Usual Suspects in the sense that, although it’s a different tone, it just goes backward and foreword in time, and yet it’s not confusing because you have different actors playing him at different—so you know exactly where you are with the different kids. But it’s just backward and foreword and it’s all inter-mingled in the way that memories are and bits of his life, which have been tragic to live through, suddenly become useful to him. All the horror he’s been through suddenly allows him to answer a question really easily. And the guys can’t believe—it’s an impossible question, they’re designed to be impossible to answer but he can answer it, you know? And it gives him the next step on his quest to get closer and closer to this girl. FD: And it weaves wonderfully with the format of the show we should say. But, also, the other thing that’s really striking about the film is the visuals. Now, you capture the chaos of Mumbai, the poverty, but also the...

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