I think there are some similarities with Trainspotting. There is a kind of energy in the film which I certainly found in Ervine Welsh’s book, Trainspotting that we tried to convey into the film and there’s an energy in Mumbai the city which is remarkably similar with its life affirming energy which is despite a lot of crap and a lot of difficulties, a lot of problems, peoples’ life spirit is affirmed and the way he does it in the book. Trainspotting is through humour, absolutely unacceptable humour, you know which is the way that the blacker things get, the darker the sense of humour gets and the more life-affirming it is. And you get that in Mumbai as well, it’s not so much in the sense of humour, it’s just the sense of energy and movement and dynamism in the city of actually not being…people regard it as poverty, you know being in slums but it’s…and they regard poverty as being abject, they don’t there, it’s a shockingly inappropriate word for it. Actually everybody is very very busy and it’s a business city on all its different levels of wealth and poverty. Everybody is out to try to make a bit of money and everybody is trying to get their kids in schools and things like that, so it feels like a bustling, dynamic city. So I think in that way it resembles Trainspotting. I think the characters in Trainspotting are characters that have chosen, when confronted with problems to swim not sink and that’s the key. So there’s a lot of thieving going on in both films and obviously we’re not meant to approve of thieving but in cinematic terms you do celebrate it in a way because it’s the way in which a character actually says, I’m going to do something that will help me survive. And in this particular case it’s nicking off tourists in Mumbai. You know it’s actually swindling a few tourists out of a bob or two, but it’s the way in which a character actually affirms how important life is to him, I guess. There are some other similarities. There’s a famous scene in Trainspotting where he disappears down a toilet and alarmingly there’s a scene in this film where the main character, when he’s a bit younger disappears down a toilet as well with slightly different results in the end. I was alarmed when we were filming those sequences, I thought, it’s the same scene, what are we doing? I thought we’d done this scene already. But there is something interesting about British film directors, how they’re obsessed with toilets. If you go and see a British film, there’s usually a scene in a toilet, when you go and see other cultures’ films there’s never scenes in toilets, or very rarely, but in our films there’s always one or two you know and there’s two in ours. Two really crucial scenes take place in toilets, and very different kinds of toilets. But toilets none the less.
