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Slumdog Millionaire

Interview Transcript

2) There seems to be a real sense of improvisation and fluidity in the filming. How does this compare to the filming of The Beach? Does a smaller budget require greater inventiveness?

Yes, I mean I made a film, The Beach which had a very big budget and I learnt from it that that was not the way to make that kind of film and I think it’s more out-moded way of filming and by that I mean that you take, to a foreign country. You take an enormous amount of western crew, and we took hundreds of people there with us and you can’t help but behave like an invading army because you can have all the good intentions in the world and be as politically correct as you want to be but basically there’s hundreds of people arrive with podiums and a kind of attitude of ‘right, where we going to do this then’ and you literally flatten everything around you. So on this one, in the end, we decided not to. I took in the end ten crew altogether that we used. It’s a lot easier to do in Mumbai because it’s the home of Bollywood, so there’s lots of Bollywood film crews so we decided to film it with film crews from the local area. They were hugely important to us. For instance, for us to get permission to film in the slums, which is what we did and we had a wonderful time filming there, you need to show that it’s local people making the film, not just westerners coming in. There were some westerners, me and the cameraman but mostly the rest of the crew and certainly all the cast were from there, you know, with the exception of Dev Patel. That helps. That creates a lot more good will than the invading army type of thing, which is useful for a local economy because an invading army comes in with lots of cash which the local economy want it to spend. But you never really win over hearts; you just win over their pockets. So it was important for us with this film, which is a more emotional film really and a film based on the life of a kid growing up there that it felt more subjective. That it was made from inside the community, I suppose.