Full
Oscars coverage I Academy
Award nominees I LA
diary I VIDEO:
James Christopher's picks I Oscars
live on Twitter
Oscars night. It's surreal just to write that. If there's only one thing I
know for sure about tomorrow night, it's that they won't be stopping me on
the red carpet to ask what designer robe I'm wearing. I'm planning to wear a
sari, which I still haven't decided on. I'll be happy to tell the waggling
microphones that I'm wearing a traditional six-yard piece of Indian cloth
that you wrap around yourself, but I imagine that that will be pretty boring
for the Oscars. Not that I'm bothered by the hoopla surrounding Slumdog
Millionaire. It was meant to be a small film by Danny Boyle. It was
supposed to be quiet - not like this.
The rollercoaster started for me on March 17, 2007, when Tabrez Noorani, one
of the film's production team, phoned from Los Angeles, where he lives, to
say that some producers were in Mumbai and wanted to meet a casting
director. I live in Delhi, but was on my way to Mumbai airport, having just
finished casting a short film about Aids for Mira Nair, my director on Monsoon
Wedding.
The producers told me that the script was by Simon Beaufoy of The Full
Monty and that Danny Boyle had agreed to direct it. I read the script on
the plane and got back to them a day later saying I wanted to do it.
The story, for me, was one of hope. It is, on the surface, about a boy who
comes from nothing, from the slums, and ends up on Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire? and is able to answer every question. But the reason that
he knows the answers is because all the questions relate to chapters in his
life. Underneath that it's really a story about life being the great
teacher, and life giving us exactly what we need, and sometimes in the most
uncanny fashion. In its own way it's almost like a homage to the cinema of
the 1960s and 1970s in India, especially the work of Salim and Javed. They
wrote as a pair and the stories had moral themes and coincidental plotlines,
just like Slumdog. I set up an office in Mumbai and started casting.
We had to get three kids from three different age groups to play the three
growing phases of the protagonists Jamal, Salim and Latika. The actors would
have to match, too - the Jamals to the Jamals, the Latikas to Latikas, and
so on. At the outset we decided to spread the net as wide as possible,
casting in five different cities - Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore and
Jodhpur. The plan was to shoot it all in English, so we wanted Indian
children who could speak English. We looked in parks, residential areas,
football grounds, line-dancing classes, anything.
But I was uncomfortable with the idea of English-speaking Indian kids. It just
didn't ring true and I felt that the spirit was missing. A few months in, I
told Danny about my reservations. I filmed real street kids doing the now
famous lavatory scene in which the youngest, Jamal, gets covered in
excrement. Danny saw the tape and said, “OK, I think we should do it this
way.”
It then became a free-for-all. I went into the slums and streets and
non-governmental shelters of Mumbai in search of the cast. I found two slum
kids, Rubiana Ali and Azharuddin Ismail (who play the youngest Latika and
youngest Salim), and put them on tape for Danny. He loved them and, although
he couldn't talk directly to them on set, they had a great connection. It
was all in the eyes.
Of course, I'd been in slums before. They are everywhere. I'm very interested
in reality and documentary and keeping the texture of things real. So I've
been to all kinds of places. I just walk through these spaces. Slums in
India are not isolated. Slum dwellers have a life. It's not like they are
these poverty-stricken people sitting around waiting for someone to come and
help them. They have a life, a culture, a business. It's a world in itself.
It's not a bunch of people waiting around. It's hustle and bustle.
At the same time as scouting, I was translating the screenplay into Hindi, and
working with Danny and Simon on elements in the script that were culturally
inappropriate. It was key that everything felt true to India: apna,
as we say - it means “ours”, and I wanted it to apply not just to the
emotions of the film, which are very Indian, very full-on, but to all
details.
For instance, the policeman interrogating Jamal was originally written as a
commissioner. This would never happen in India — it's a power thing. So we
brought him down to inspector. Every day something new would come up: the
production design, the costumes, how a person stood or sat. All this had to
be culturally figured out.
We started shooting on November 4, 2007. A few nights before, Danny came over
to me and said: “Now that the basic casting is over, I think you should step
in.” It wasn’t just for the kids when they were on set, it was for a broader
cultural compass too. I was to be co-director: India. That was decided there
and then. I was on set all the time, whenever the kids were around. The crew
used to joke that I was mother hen, but I like to think of myself as big
sister. The lavatory scene was a strange one to film. It was a windy day and
Ayush Khedekar, the young actor playing Jamal, was drowned in peanut butter
and chocolate sauce — and he was freezing. He was meant to run, but couldn’t
move because of the weight of the peanut butter. He eventually did,
shivering all the time. It comes across on screen as great excitement, but
it wasn’t.
I actually found the boy who plays Jamal in the suburbs. His father wanted to
be an actor, and must have put a theatrical spark in him very early in life.
When he walked in he had such charisma. We were still thinking of doing it
in English then, and he didn't speak the language, so I knew it would be a
problem. The minute we changed it to Hindi I brought him right back.
I still think of the kids, and keep in touch with them. I heard from little
Rubiana Ali two days ago, saying that her passport was ready, and that she
was going to try for a visa, which was great to hear. She’s hoping to go to
the Oscars. The Mumbai team are looking after it; I really hope she gets
there.
When the filming with the children was finished, I thought I would go home to
Delhi. But no, Danny asked me to stay on and shoot some second-unit footage
around Mumbai. I love the city. I love going there. I’m a Delhi girl, but
the city gets into your veins. It’s very vibrant, and it’s always on the
move. It’s packed in, it’s narrow, with little space, and yet they get more
done in that small space than any other city I know.
We wrapped in February 2008, although we did some reshoots that included the
final kiss scene in the VT railway station in Mumbai. Danny hadn’t included
a kiss because we don’t kiss in Indian films, and he wanted to respect that.
But test audiences kept asking, “Why aren’t these people kissing?” So we
discussed it again, and I said that they should, that kissing was not taboo.
And, of course, there has since been not a word about the kiss in India.
The controversies around the film didn’t appear at first. People embraced it.
We weren’t thinking of Globes and Oscars, but the momentum kept building.
Even after the November massacres in Mumbai I felt, more than ever, that the
city needed a film like Slumdog to celebrate its dynamism.
We’ve always known the city to have a power like no other. It has this kind of
resilience, but I have never seen it under attack in the way that it
happened this time. We’ve had blasts before, and communal riots. But the way
that it happened this time was a true test of how the city survives. I’d
been travelling with the film in London and New York, I came back to do the
Hindi dub and two days later therewas the attack. Looking from an outsider’s
point of view, I think — and I hope — that Slumdog has
helped people to better relate to the city. I don’t think it has been
represented ever in the way that it has been with this film.
At worst, I thought that the film would jolt everybody in India and abroad by
showing the poverty that we know exists but that we ignore, even in our
minds. Naturally, there are organisations that work in the slums, and with
the communities. I wish that more was being done, but I also see the
constraints on the Government. It’s a huge uphill task, and I don’t know
that we can fix it overnight. Because I don’t think these communities want
that. The Government in Mumbai tried to take people out of the slums and
re-house them in housing communities and they’ve refused. There were huge
protests. The slum dwellers said, ‘No, we’re not going anywhere. Our
business is here. We don’t need to go, and live in so-called “better
homes”.’ It’s tricky. You can’t be on the outside and imagine what is good
for someone else in that situation. We all have different parameters.
The controversy and the protests that emerged — suggesting that we looked at
slum dwellers in a negative way — mostly came from from about 20 people in
Bihar, in the centre of India. They started a petition without even seeing
the film. It got serious only when reporters from abroad started picking up
the story. And besides, the word “slumdog”, which seemed to cause such
offence, is no worse than many of the words in Bollywood movies used to
describe people who have nothing. Naali ka keeba, for instance, literally
means “the worm of a drain” and was used to describe people like that in
Indian movies. “Slumdog” is just a reflection of how we used to speak. There
have been other controversies, I was in the studio in Mumbai, dubbing
Slumdog into Hindi, when my line producer told me that a group of women in
Chicago had said that I was not getting the right credit or awards for
co-directing the film. Again, it was whipped up out of proportion. It wasn’t
a proper controversy because it was Danny’s film. It was always meant to be
Danny’s film.
I stayed in Mumbai for the Indian opening, which ended up with me giving
interviews from morning to night. It went down well, people really
appreciated it, that it was told in an interesting way, it cuts across
boundaries, and it feels so familiar. The only criticism I’ve heard is that
the songs are too short — “‘Why do they cut the songs off before they
finish?” Because, in Bollywood movies we play the full song. That’s why are
films are so long.
On a personal level the film has given me the confidence to move closer to my
dream, which is to direct my own films. I feel ready after my time as a
co-director on Slumdog, with someone like Danny. I’ve said before
that I feel like an off-screen millionaire, and it’s true. The experience
has been so enriching for me. In everything I’ve done on it. And I won’t
forget it soon.
As told to Kevin Maher
