HOWZAT

As Jamal anxiously explains to the authorities how the school of hard knocks has prepped him for the quiz show’s questions, he thereby relates his life story: a tale of hardship and suffering, endurance and love, involving his older brother, Salim, and an orphaned girl they meet, Latika. There’s something Dickensian about this bold conflation of realism, adventure and melodrama. Dumas’s Three Musketeers also informs its romantic spirit — simply because Beaufoy happened to see Disney’s Three Mouseketeers on television during one of his trips to the slum.

“It clicked with me because of the three kids,” he says. “Dumas allowed me to be as romantic and operatic as I wanted.” In Britain, he says, we are too comfortable to produce truly visceral writing. “If it’s noisy, you shut the double glazing. If it’s raining, you get a taxi — and our stories are subtle and refined. India is intense and smelly, the colours are incredible, it’s terrifying and fascinating and energising. The operatic and the melodramatic are things I would normally steer away from, but here it feels absolutely appropriate.”

Boyle had the same reaction. “I loved it,” he says, not for the last time. “Mumbai is like New York in the 1980s. It has that potential, the electricity coming out of the place is phenomenal.” He even scheduled the second unit’s activities so he could keep shooting on his days off. “I would still be there now. They had to drag me away to edit it.”

He says India reinvigorated him — and it shows. Largely shot on a prototype digital camera system (SI-2K), the movie has deep, dark tones and vibrant textures, but is as light and fleet as anything Boyle has done since Trainspotting. He doesn’t turn away from poverty, but he doesn’t fetishise it either. Rather, he embraces the extreme contrasts and runs with them: the squalor of the slums (there’s a harrowing sequence in which we see orphans blinded and dismembered by a Fagin-like character) and the rapid transformation that is sweeping across this hypercapitalist 21st- century superpower. The one isn’t necessarily better than the other, but the energy is infectious. “There’s no attitude other than survival, and ‘Let’s go, come on’,” Boyle enthuses.

Think of a Boyle film and it’s the momentum that grabs you, the drive. He rates sensation over nuance, invention over reflection, and he’s not afraid of catching the eye; in fact, he would catch your eye with every shot if he could. He wants to dazzle us, and in this movie, he certainly does. “You get those terrible films with westerners in foreign cultures, and it’s all kind of distant,” he says. “You can’t stand apart from it. I thought the only way it would have any truthfulness was if I chucked myself right in it.”

Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? fulfils the role of the westerner in this film. (“That’s our white guy,” as Boyle puts it.) Safe and familiar, it allows us a point of entry into this strange world. But didn’t the television quiz show object to the suggestion that a winning contestant might be pulled off and tortured at the drop of a hat? Apparently not: as it happens, the movie’s producer, Christian Colson, was a co-founder of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? who sold his stake some years ago for a not-so-small fortune, which he uses as venture capital for films like this one. And he cannily retained the right to use the name of the show in a feature. No flies on Colson.

What about the Indian government — surely they had something to say about such dodgy PR? Boyle laughs again: “We told them about the torture. They said, ‘That’s fine, as long as nobody above the rank of inspector is involved.’ Which shows how endemic it is.”

Beaufoy visited the country 20 years ago as a teenager. “Then, there were lots of colonial echoes around,” he recalls. “That’s all been wiped clean. The India we think we know — Gandhi and cricket and the Raj — that’s over. Now it’s capitalism on steroids. You say you’re from London and it means nothing to the kids there. China they’re interested in, America kind of, but not so much. They’ve turned their back on the west because we’re just not moving fast enough for them. It makes you feel very small. Our time is over, and America can’t save us.”

Beaufoy talks about a slum location he found during his wanderings around Mumbai. Returning to show Boyle a year later, he found the slum had been razed and they were staring at a brand-new high-rise: “In a year! In Britain, it would take that long to put up a sign.”

“Part of the reason this film works is that Mumbai and Danny are really similar,” he adds. “Absolutely intense and committed. The harder it got, the bigger the smile on Danny’s face became. There were times when I was really scared. We filmed in the city’s red-light district and thousands of people gathered round to watch. It could easily have got out of hand at any point. But Danny just feeds off that energy.”

Ask Boyle about his previous movie and you begin to understand why Mumbai was more his natural speed. “Sunshine took three years,” he scowls. “That’s too long. You make good decisions, then you get so bored, you start playing around with bad ones. I wanted to make something very different, very quickly.”

Right now, he’s not sure what’s next, but one possibility obviously tickles him: “Anil Kapoor [who plays the police captain in the film] says Slumdog would never play to a mainstream Indian audience because it would have to be much more extreme for them. He’s trying to get the Hindi rights for a remake. I’d love to see a Bollywood version. In fact, I’d love to be the assistant director on it. . .”

Slumdog Millionaire closes the Times BFI London Film Festival on Thursday and opens nationwide on January 23

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