Danny Boyle On His Oscar-Nominated ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and the Smell of India

When Little Miss Sunshine rode festival buzz and strong word-of-mouth all the way to surprising box-office and a Best Picture nomination, it became "The Little Movie That Could," a charming feel-good tale with enough heart and originality enter the national zeitgeist. Last year, that movie was Juno, and this year, the honor undoubtedly goes to Slumdog Millionaire.

Since premiering at the Toronto Film Festival this past September, it has improbably become the biggest success story of the year not starring Christian Bale. I use the word improbable because it is shot in India using actors unknown to American audiences, and because half of it is spoken in Hindi. But the film, which last week received a whopping ten Oscar nominations, is contagious in its hope and astonishing in its beauty. Perhaps most unlikely about the film’s success story is that its director is Danny Boyle, a Brit who until now was known for the heroin opus Trainspotting, and the zombie redux 28 Days Later. Now he is a Golden Globe winner and an Oscar nominee (and favorite) for Best Director. What Boyle does most magnificently is he introduces us to an India breathless in its beauty and devastating in its poverty.

What was the most shocking thing that you saw while there?
Whoa, I think it’s pretty much the same for everybody—when you see a beggar nearing your car and they knock on the window, and you can clearly see that their hands have been deliberately cut off. You have to get your head around it really, I mean you’re overwhelmed by it, but that kind of action is just pointless because it’s not about you, it has something to do with what it’s like for him, really. And you have to get into the mindset there, like that guy, the way he deals with it is that he regards that as his destiny. That’s the way that destiny has dealt to him. And it’s a very profound feeling out there. Destiny is quite a casual concept with us. It’s a very different concept there, and it helps them deal with stuff like that and that.

What’s the smell like?
The smell of India is unique, and of course that’s the one thing you definitely can’t do on film. It’s a mixture of humanity, which is our excrement, and saffron, and then excrement again. It’s the most extraordinary smell ... you can’t get it anywhere else. I think one of the reasons is the extremes of life. Actually, you realize what we do in the West, is that the extremes, we tend to kind of section off, to give ourselves some comfort zones. There are always extremes everywhere, but we tend to section them off, and there they just co-exist the whole time at their most extreme, and the smell is an example of it—it’s so sweet and so awful, all at the same time.

What about the food over there, what do people eat, what did you eat. Is it safe?
Oh God yeah, you’ve got to be a bit careful, but it’s amazing food. If you’re a vegetarian, you could not go to a better place in the world. I’m not a vegetarian, but it is wonderful, and there’s more choice there than anywhere, because it’s a vegetarian nation, although they do eat meats. That food is extraordinary.

When you first got there, were you kind of overwhelmed with the scenery and how much there was to shoot?
Yeah, you just kind of can’t stop. I had to be dragged away in the end. In fact, the producer and all my crew went home, and I kept shooting with the Indian crew, and then the producer just basically got on a plane and shut all the bank accounts and that was it. And you only get a bit of it, but if you’re lucky, you did it well.

When you’re walking the city streets, do you get a sense of the sheer density of the population?
There are people everywhere. And the traffic’s chaotic, and the infrastructure is not there, but despite that, it works. That’s what’s interesting. You can spend your life trying to work that out, or you can just accept that there is somehow a pattern that works. And you get little glimpses of it occasionally, but most of the time, it’s completely indecipherable. You can’t see it, I can’t see it, but you trust it, and it will benefit you.

Is there a lot of crime?
No, not particularly. There is a lot of gangsterism, the gangsters run the city in many ways; but in terms of casual crime, it feels like a very safe place in many ways.

Has there ever been anywhere you’ve been that’s comparable to this?
No, you can’t compare. All those kind of things like, “What do you compare it to?” or “Can you control it?” or understand it even, they’re all slightly irrelevant, really. You have to just experience it I think. If you enjoy it, it’s immeasurable what it does to you. It is a bit hippie, and I was never a hippie—I was always a punk—but you do go there to learn. You learn about yourself, and obviously about those of us who occupy this planet. They always recycled in India, and we recycle now, because we’re desperately trying to catch up with the fact that we’re destroying the planet. But they’ve recycled forever in India. It’s part of the whole way the nation is built. People throw things away, but as they do it, there’s a whole other class of people who pick those things up.

There’s a scene in the film where one of the characters jumps into a pool of feces, and is covered in it for the rest of the scene. So was it actually shit?
It’s the same thing we used in Trainspotting. It’s peanut butter and chocolate.

Was the child actor happy to be covered in that?
Yeah, he was great. Although, it’s not all that pleasant to be covered in peanut butter and chocolate. He was just keen to get the scene over with.

What’s the fundamental difference between life over there and life over here?
I think there isn’t any separation of anything. They don’t separate things like we do. It’s all one. And that goes from the most extreme horror and poverty, to the most outrageous wealth and affluence. And they’re aware that destiny links them, and makes them inseparable. I think what we’ve done, we’ve built these comfort zones for ourselves, where we tend to separate ourselves from people, and it’s not a question of crowding, it’s a question of attitude and mentality. They believe they’re all in together really, for good and bad, and some people get really bad hands, but they don’t think of it like it’s a bad hand. They don’t regard it like that.

You asked M.I.A. to do a song for the film?
We asked her if we could use “Paper Planes”, and she watched the movie and she was very generous, gave me very smart notes. I said we were going to do the music with A.R. Rahman, and when she was growing up, he was one of her heroes, so she sang on one of his tracks.