Danny Boyle
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Most film critics will tell you that director Danny Boyle has a distinctive style, but they'd be hard-pressed to pin down exactly what that is. All of his films have been radically different. After breaking out with a harrowing ode to drug addicts in 1996's Trainspotting, he's made a romantic comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), a critically-acclaimed kids movie (Millions), a sci-fi space movie (Sunshine) and even a zombie movie (28 Days Later).
The link' Energy. There's a palpable enthusiasm, an eagerness to entertain, in each of those films. Not surprisingly, that energy extends to Boyle himself, a fifty-two-year-old England native who's both excitable and exceedingly polite.
"It doesn't work like you think it works," Boyle says when asked how he chooses projects. "And I'd never want it to work like that. I remember an interview with Martin Scorsese where he said it's so difficult to make a decision about what to do next. I don't think it is at all. You just get a feeling when you get the script, like in the first pages."
Boyle is talking to me and two colleagues as part of the press tour for his new movie, Slumdog Millionaire. Unsurprisingly, the film is like nothing he's ever done: it tells the story of a teenager from the slums of India who goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, does well, and is promptly arrested for cheating. He then tells his remarkable life story to the police in order to explain how he knew all the answers.
"With Slumdog Millionaire, my agent only said it was a movie about Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and I thought, doesn't sound great," Boyle says. "I only read it because I knew the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty. And about 15 or 20 pages in you know that you're going to be able to make an amazing film out of it. I was one page into this and I was certain I would make it. It's like with Trainspotting. I read the first line of that book -- "The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling" -- and I thought, I have to make this movie."
Beyond instincts, though, Boyle does have a specific reasoning why he chooses such different material. "Technically, you should get better with each film, but you really only do that in a technical sense. I think you're only as good as your first film. Look at the Coen brothers. Their movies are amazing, but in my opinion nothing will ever beat Blood Simple. So with that logic the best thing to do is try something you've never done."
At heart, the story in Slumdog Millionaire is a love story with a traditional (and undoubtedly crowd-pleasing) structure to it. It's the film's on-location shooting of the Indian slums that gives it its visceral immediacy -- which, again, is quite different from his last film, Sunshine, which was shot entirely on sets.
"You couldn't find a bigger change of pace from studio to India," Boyle says. "You can control every detail in a studio. In India you can control almost nothing...You've got to think how you can convey this to the people watching. You can't do it with the smell, which is the first thing you notice [when you're there]. You've got to find the visuals that really express it. It's got to knock you off balance, like the opening chase through the streets. I didn't want to go there and do a sort of tourist shooting, with big camera and set-ups. I didn't want to do any of that. I really wanted people to feel that they had been there. And also, fundamentally, I think movies are about motion. That is how they started, you know, capturing movement. I love action movies for that reason."
Even with the script in hand, going to India was a culture shock for Boyle. "Nobody cared about me being British," he says laughing, "which really shocked me, you know, because we were ruling their country for years. They just don't care anymore about colonialism."
Instead, they've set their sights into the future. "America is going to be seeing a lot more of India in the future. Capitalism has reached an extreme here, but it's still growing and expanding in India and China. They don't even see the British anymore. What they see is the U.S. economy. Those are the comparisons they make. They want to catch up. It's very interesting how they compete with the rest of the world. China has a space program so they have one. They're going to the moon but they don't have public toilets. It's full of those kinds of contradictions.
"We use to laugh at them for certain things. They've always recycled. People will throw things out the window while they're driving and you'll think it's pollution but it isn't. It's a connected thing because there is this whole group of people who collect the trash and recycle it. They won't cut down a tree to build a road, they just build around it. We would've laughed at them for that 20 years ago but now it looks like that attitude is probably right. You think you'll go there to teach them things about how to make a movie, but they'll teach you."
Over the course of the film, each main character is played by three different actors: a seven-year-old, a twelve-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old.
"It's really tough to sell that to the studios," Boyle says. "There's a habit of 29-year-olds playing 13 that makes no sense. They were fine with the kids playing kids but wondered why the same guy couldn't play 18 and 12. My argument was that people wouldn't accept that and the film would come out flawed. Thankfully, I won."
And unlike most directors, Boyle actually likes working with kids. "I'm quite immature myself. I think kids can sense that you'll be good with them and it makes it much easier to work with them. It's really great to be fooling around with them on the set. I like working with them, but they're tough for other actors, because when they nail it, it comes out so honest and bigger. They always say not to work with kids -- because they're frightened of them."
Already the film has been met with raves, starting with it winning the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival -- an almost certain route to Oscar nominations. Anything to get people to see the movie, Boyle says.
"It's amazing to have the platform to let people know about the film. We're in that award season slot now so people are going to talk about it. Otherwise we never thought about that. The idea that we would get a nomination was not in our minds at all. It's fantastic to even consider it. It would be great to have one, but it isn't why we made the film.
"I didn't even think the movie would work in America. Dev (Patel, the lead actor) is from a British show (Skins) so I thought we had some attraction there in England. But America' I think I forgot that it is an underdog story. Internally Americans root for the underdog. The idea that a man with nothing but a dream can get anywhere."
