Could this be Danny’s year?
If the reviews of hard-bitten critics who are smothered with front-row seats at film festivals and preview screenings are anything to go by, then Danny and the Slumdog Millionaire crew - in all their underdog glory - could be occupying the same seats that accommodated Juno’s merrymakers last year, and the Little Miss Sunshine bunch the year before, at the Kodak Theatre. And this ‘Hybrid Bollywood film’ just might walk away with a statue for Best Picture.
Danny is certainly no one-hit wonder. In between Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, the director tackled a zombie flick, 28 Days Later; Millions, a charming coming-of-age tale; and a sci-fi movie, Sunshine. To jump genres at every turn like he did is a feat in itself. Besides, except for Sunshine, the films fared well at the Box Office, at least enough to satiate its production companies.
After a successful premiere at the London Film Festival, and bagging acclaim and accolades at both the Telluride and Toronto Film Festival, his latest film is hailed as nonpareil this year.
Slumdog Millionaire is based on the novel Q and A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup. Written for the screen by Simon Beaufoy of The Full Monty fame, the film follows its orphan protagonist through the bustling city of Bombay as he battles a hard life in the slums, loses his love interest to destiny, and goes on to win 20 million rupees in the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, only to be harassed and interrogated by authorities who suspect him of cheating on the show.
Being a low-budget production, Celador Films (the original TV production company behind the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show) and Film4 managed to cut costs drastically as Danny, Simon, lead actor Dev Patel and only another handful of their British crew needed to be flown to India for the filming. The rest of the cast and crew were recruited in India with the help of Loveleen Tandon - the assistant director on Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding - who Danny payed in gratitude with a co-director credit on the film. He also repeatedly acknowledged to the press that the film wouldn’t be without her.
As for the lead role of Jamal Malik, Danny took the advice of his teenage daughter and chose to go with Dev Patel. Dev rose to fame last year as one of the seven main party-throwing, pill-popping, bad-mouthing, dysfunctional teen characters on E4’s Bristol-based hit television series Skins. After two successful seasons in the UK, Australia, parts of America, and over the Internet through illegal downloads, it was time for the characters to move on - they graduated from sixth-form college and got into Universities or left the city. The actors were let go, and auditions were on for new ones with a whole new beginning for Season 3. Most of the young actors from the show landed roles in other films, videos and even with theatre companies on the West End. Dev, the last of the lot to get a casting call, was stoked when Danny Boyle tried to reach him.
Before Dev came in, Boyle conducted numerous auditions in India head-hunting for the male and female leads. To his disappointment, the trend in Bollywood for up and coming male actors was ripped biceps and triceps, body-hugging shirts and six-pack abdomens. What he was looking for was the exact opposite - an average, lanky lad who could play an underdog. When he returned to the UK and finally met Dev, he was sold.
For the female role, auditions in Bombay went in full swing. Freida, the chosen one, was handed the role when her on-stage chemistry with Dev created a spark in Loveleen and Danny’s braincells. For the younger roles of the characters, child actors from around the country flocked the auditions with their hopeful parents. Auditions are a hard thing in a country populated by a billion residents, more than a quarter of whom dream of a life on the silver screen. For the centric adult roles of game show host and the suspicious authority figure, Danny signed on Bollywood veterans Anil Kapoor and Irfan Khan. The latter played the father of the child who Adrien Brody failed to save from death’s hands in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited.
With the cast confirmed, the next big obstacle was filming in the slums. Danny recalled at press conferences about how difficult it was to record live sound with onlookers gathered around the set, watching every move of his muscle. But the scorching heat, dripping sweat and a hundred watchful eyes only inspired him as he fell more in love with India and its people. The down-to-earth director even made friends in the slums and was invited into their huts during break and set-up. In his own words, he had to be dragged out of the country and back to the UK to edit the film in post-production.
Post-production was yet another adventure for him as he worked with heart-pumping tunes put together by Indian composer A.R. Rahman. Those lucky enough to catch a preview screening are in full praise of the Bollywood song-and-dance number - surprisingly the only one for the predominantly Indian film - that serves as an epilogue. Apparently, as the characters began to dance and the credits began to roll, audience at London, Toronto and Telluride honored the film with a standing ovation, something that is a rarity at festivals these days.
With all this hype and hoo-ha surrounding Slumdog Millionaire now, few will know that there was a good chance this film could have been buried under Warner’s repository, with no hope of being released. Welcome to the ‘business’ of filmmaking, the dark side. Warner Independent Pictures, the wing of Warner that deals with independent productions acquired distribution rights in the US, while Pathe won international rights during pre-production in 2007. Celador fixed the film’s budget at $15 million and was in search of partnership to dig up the money. Warner Independent beat Fox Searchlight in a $5 million bid to co-fund the film, an offer Fox could not afford to equal at that time for an experimental film with unknown actors, in which twenty-percent of the dialogues were not in English. With Warner Independent, Celador and Film4 behind him, Danny began the filming process sometime in August 2007. Nine months later, in post-production, when Boyle was adding the finishing touch to Slumdog Millionaire, the bad news hit him hard: Warner announced that it was shutting down its two arthouse wings, Warner Independent and Picturehouse as the market became weak and profits dwindled. It was dead-end.
Warner’s president Jeff Robinov saw the finished film and did not have the heart to disregard it. But there was nothing he could do.
Then in August 2008, Jeff made an unexpected business move and invited rival Fox Searchlight’s execs for a screening. Fox Searchlight’s president Peter Rice had read the script before and loved it to bits. He was more than excited to see the finished product. After the screening, Fox Searchlight’s COO, Steve Gilula who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter said: “When the lights went up, we said, ‘What do we have to do to get this?’”
The two companies worked a deal where Searchlight will take up marketing and distribution costs in exchange for a modest fee, and the profits will be equally shared. The film was back on the track, right in time for the festival season. Two days later it went to Telluride and received a standing ovation. The following week it won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto Film Festival, and Roger Ebert predicted that more than one Oscar nod is on the cards for Slumdog Millionaire. And we all know that Ebert never gets it wrong this time of the year.
Fox opened the film to limited screens in the US on November 12th. With audience response exceeding their expectations, the film has been slated for wide release on November 27th. While Pathe still hold international distribution rights, they are opening the film worldwide on January 23rd, exactly a month before the big showdown at Kodak.
So could this be Danny’s year? We think so.
Richard Curtis blew up big after his directorial debut with Love Actually in 2003. And then for five years, we never heard from him. Well, there was that Bridget Jones movie for which he wrote the screenplay, but that barely made any noise.
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