Director Danny Boyle, best known for the films Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, recently chatted with us about his latest film, Slumdog
Millionaire, and his career thus far. Below is an excerpt from our conversation; you'll also hear the full interview on an upcoming Armchair Commentary podcast. -- Robert
Robert Arambel: I’ve been
interested in seeing the press that’s already happened on this film. I’ve seen on more than one occasion the tag
line “Hollywood meets Bollywood”. What I
saw when watching the film was much more Satyajit Ray “Apu Trilogy” than
Bollywood. Was that in your mind when
making this film?
Danny Boyle: Yeah, I can see
that. Well, realism was. Bollywood isn’t realism-based really; it has
a very different culture. I can
understand why that is now, because it’s partly escapism, obviously,
because
it’s built for an abjectly poor country in many ways, and a fantastical
escape
is understandable. But it’s also that
when they make a film, they make it very intermittently. They make a
lot of films, but very few of
them are made in one go, because they will film for two weeks, and they
have to
wait two to three months for their star to become available again,
because of
all the commitments of the stars. So
they are all made very sporadically, in the sense that once they start,
they
may take many years to finish a film. So
they have no coherence at all, and they aren’t interested in that arc
of
completion that we regard as being really important. And they just make
them for moments. And the bit s in between are the bits in
between, and they are made many years apart at times, so they will
inevitably be
like that. Whereas we are much more
realism-based. We judge things, we say,
“Is that real? Do I believe that or not?” So you tend to make a film in
one go, and you
tend to try to make it as coherent as possible. So my benchmark is
realism, so inevitably you are going to invoke films
like that rather than the Bollywood films. There are filmmakers there
now that do work in the way we work. Their benchmark is realism again.
They don’t get as much publicity as the
Bollywood stuff but they are really good, some really really good
filmmakers. They are not huge budget
films because they are not going to travel that far, because the taste
isn’t
there yet, but that is changing as well.
RA: I think over the past few years our
relationship with India has changed dramatically.
DB: It’s changing. I think it’s inevitable with its economic
rise. There are a billion people there, but within that, everyone has known there is a huge amount of
people that live there, but what people are beginning to realize is that of
that, there are 300 million people that are middle class, who are driving this
economy. That is basically the same
population as America, but they are all middle class, with incomes and spending
power. They are dictating taste, in all
walks of life, including movies. They
want a different kind of movie now. It
is driving change, and America is paying more attention now. They have a curious mixture of change, and
what the British left, and what the Russians left, they’ve left this incredible
bureaucracy, which when making a film you need to try to avoid. What you do is work with the local production
company, and they would run the whole permissions thing on a parallel track
with the film. Normally you work in
tandem, together. But there is no way
you would make a film working in tandem. You’ve got to run it as a parallel universe which never connects with
the main film, because you have to get your permissions from somewhere else.
RA: There is what
I’ve come to think of as a “Danny Boyle” spin on certain genres: Zombies for 28 Days Later, Sci-Fi for Sunshine. Do you think about that when
making a movie, putting a fresh spin on a genre?
DB: Obviously they
are genres in a way, but you don’t tend to think like that when you approach
them. Obviously 28 Days Later is
slightly different because it’s such a specific genre; we were deliberately
trying to contradict the genre at different points. You don’t tend to think like that. You tend to change because it puts you back
to the beginning each time, which is a good place to start, because you’ve got
to try to start fresh every time, to
tell it as freshly as possible. Because
if you bring too many of your old skills to it, it will look like that, I
think. Audiences are really savvy now;
they want to see a subject approached in a fresh way. They want there to be a reason to go to the
cinema. That’s the only thing in terms
of calculatedly thinking about it. Most
of the time you are not thinking about that – you are thinking about the story,
about the characters, and you tend to have a bit of amnesia about this side of
this side of the world, about selling it afterwards, and that’s one of the
reasons I won’t do any huge budget movies, because you can’t have amnesia about
sales. If you’ve taken 100 million
dollars, you’ve got to earn that money back, where if you’ve taken 10 million,
you’ve got a good chance you’ll make that back anyway, because it will appeal
to the people that want to go to the cinema to see something different.
RA: What would your
essential movie be?
DB: I don’t know if
it’s the essential movie, but my favorite movie is Apocalypse Now. You automatically say, “It’s amazing the way
it hasn’t dated”. It’s an automatic
thing to say about a great movie like that. You never even think it was made 20, 25 years…
RA: I think it’s
almost 30 now.
DB: Almost 30 years, yeah. 1979 it was released. You never even say “Hasn’t it aged well?” or
“It hasn’t aged at all”. You don’t even
think that. That to me is a masterpiece. That’s very very special. Having said that, there is a weird other
movie called Au Revoir Les Enfants, a Louis Malle film, from France, which is
one of the most wonderful films ever made I think. Not so many people would know this film as
know “Apocalypse Now”, but it’s really a great film worth catching.
(1/12/09 - Last night Danny Boyle won Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards, while Slumdog Millionaire took home the award for Best Picture )
