Feature story om Slumdog Millionaire og Danny Boyle.

“SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE”, THE UNDERDOG.
by Elin Astrid Gjøvik Glad.

Danny Boyle and his film “Slumdog Millionaire” is nominated for 10 Oscars, but have had many obstacles along its way.

Danny Boyle, the director of “Slumdog Millionaire” didn’t actually want to direct it at first. “Why would anybody want to watch a film about a game show?” he thought. He decided to give the script a go, and 10 pages in he realized the story was actually very good. The award-winning director says that he really didn’t have a choice when it came to making the movie. “They just highjack you,” he explains.

But Danny Boyle being sceptical was not the only thing that stood in the way of this film. “Slumdog Millionaire” lost it’s distributor in America just a couple of months ago. Boyle thought: “That’s it, we won’t get a release.” He knew the movie had a good audience in Europe and that there was a big Indian population, especially in Britain. “You have to accept faith sometimes,” he says. But then something extraordinary happened. Fox Searchlight Pictures discovered the film, and they loved it. To Boyle it was like a twist of fate. “It was like the kid in the film…You’ll get there if what you dream is right.”

The movie, about an 18 year-old orphan who becomes a millionaire winning a game show, was shot in Mumbai, India. Boyle calls it “a flowered and vivid city.” “I’ve never been to India before making this film,” he says. He and his crew went on an exploration trip to get to know the city.

The director of films like “Trainspotting” and “The Beach” says he “starts from scratch” when he is making a new movie. “I like to start by thinking: ‘I know nothing.” Boyle tries to do things that seem different from one another, but says he always gets to a point where he feels like he is repeating himself. For Boyle, that is part of the “mental torment” of being a director.

As a control freak, shooting the movie in such a vivid and uncontrollable environment as Mumbai was a challenge for Boyle. “Two thirds of the day you achieve nothing,” he says. But after hours of shooting, “something is given back to you,” as the director puts it.

“Slumdog Millionaire has already won the “People’s Choice Awards” at Toronto Film Festival and is nominated for 10 Oscars. When asking Danny Boyle how many Oscars he thinks they’ll win, he replies: “If we’re in the room, we’ll be very happy. We’ll be in the back waving.”

ENDS

424 words.