Navigating the heart of a foreign land for 'Slumdog'

Director Danny Boyle finds his way in India

Dev Patel (above, left) plays a kid from an Indian shantytown who becomes a contestant on a quiz show with Anil Kapoor the host in ''Slumdog Millionaire,'' directed by Danny Boyle (below), who spent eight months in Mumbai working on the film. (Ishika Mohan/Fox Searchlight via bloomberg news)

Danny Boyle stepped off the plane in Mumbai, and India hit him smack in the face.

"The temperature, the heat, the smell!" Boyle said cheerfully of that first visit to India, noting the mingled scents of saffron and sewage. "They're inseparable, of course. You can't separate anything there, and that's what's extraordinary about it, I think."

"Trainspotting" director Boyle spent eight months in Mumbai making his new movie, "Slumdog Millionaire," and that inseparability drives the Dickens-goes-to-Bollywood plot. The movie, opening locally on Friday, follows a street urchin quite literally from a fetid outhouse pit to the 20-million-rupee question on the Indian production of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire."

"Obviously there's poor in every society . . . here we separate ourselves from them. But in Mumbai everything's inseparable, everything's on top of one another," Boyle said. "I was amazed, even a superstar like Anil Kapoor [who plays the "Millionaire" host] - he's a superstar in India, but his consciousness of those beggars on the street is much greater than we would have here.

"It's a physical thing, you can't separate them, but it's also a philosophical thing that has to do with that theme of destiny they have. Which I always thought was a very negative thing, that your path was set and it had to be like that. I thought that just makes you passive, and you accept it. But what it does is make you realize that the person who hasn't had the luck is your equal, they just haven't had the destiny."

Destiny is cruel when we first meet 18-year-old "slumdog" Jamal Malik: Jamal is one question away from winning the big money on "Millionaire," having become a national hero in the process. But the authorities think he's cheating, so when the show breaks for the night, he's dragged off to an interrogation room. Two policemen beat him, torturing him with electroshock and holding his head in a bucket of water.

Finally Jamal says he'll tell the police how he knew each one of the answers. Each flashback tells us a little more of the story of Jamal and his brother Salim and their beautiful friend Latika, an epic tale of hardship and loss, Taj Mahal tourists and big-city gangsters, courage and incredible luck. Always the movie circles back to the brightly lit TV studio, where even more is at stake than we first suspected.

Three actors each play one of the three main characters at different ages. Most of the cast was recruited in India, including both unknowns and familiar faces like Kapoor. Only Dev Patel, who plays Jamal at 18, came from the UK, where Boyle's daughter had seen him in the miniseries "Skins." The script is by Simon ("The Full Monty") Beaufoy, loosely based on a little-known novel "Q & A," by Vikas Swarup.

The movie is rich in old-fashioned storytelling, full of humor and pathos, narrow escapes and terrible ordeals.

"I think this is why fantasy films are so successful at the moment, because that's the only place you can see those extremes of storytelling anymore, because our societies have become more comfortable, and we tend to have expelled those extremes of storytelling into fantasy," Boyle said. "India allows you to still do it, I think because their society is still built on those extremes. It doesn't have the comfort zones, it doesn't have health and safety, it doesn't have political correctness. It is savagely real."

When we first meet Jamal, age 7, he's using a pay-as-you-go outhouse on stilts over a swamp in the huge shantytown by the Mumbai airport. He's locked inside by an angry attendant just as a crowd of his neighbors surges onto the runway to greet a Bollywood superstar landing in a helicopter. The only way Jamal can meet the great man is to jump through the hole in the floor. He emerges to meet the star covered head-to-toe in . . .

"It's very extreme," Boyle says with a laugh. "Everybody laughs at that scene - but that's his character! He has a dream, and he has a problem, which is [excrement]. And he just goes through it! He'll go through anything to get to his dream. . . . Everything you need to know about him is right in there."

The scene was shot at a row of outhouses and showcases the extreme poverty that's a fact of life for millions in Mumbai, despite explosive economic growth in the "maximum city." Don't, however, use the word "squalor" if you're talking to Boyle.

"Part of you thinks, 'Oh my God!' " he said. "But the other part of you thinks, wait a minute, we all do this every morning, they just haven't been furnished with decent toilets. That's not their fault, they are absolutely doing the best they can.

"We had a great time working [in the shantytowns], and they're not like you think they are. They're amazing places with their own society and values, and they are actually really admirable, able, incredibly resourceful people," he said. "The alternative they're offered is enormous blocks of flats out of the city. But they don't want that. What's important to them is not bricks and mortar, but the actual community, the support they get from each other, living in these very tightly packed, densely packed communities, the sense of life, the vividness you get there that they have every day.

"So the word 'squalor,' I wouldn't attribute to it. I mean, you show it like it is, and people can regard it like that, but the spirit of the film I hope transcends that, and to be honest, the spirit of the people transcends their apparent circumstances," Boyle said.

No surprise that India changed the way Boyle works.

"It's everything, really," Boyle said. "I remember that we shot some tests very early on, on film, proper celluloid cameras and stuff like that, and I didn't like it at all, it felt like exactly the kind of film I didn't want to make. It felt slightly judgmental and objective.

"There is that danger with cinematography there. There are so extraordinary sights, and you do want to go, WOW. But I didn't want to do that. The problem with that is, we are Westerners coming here, and the only way it will work is if we don't stop to look. So you just shoot it from the inside, in the way anybody who lives in a city looks at it."

That meant shooting with small, lightweight digital cameras, but it also meant abandoning a certain Hollywood mindset.

"I thought, there's no way of ever making sense of [Mumbai] in the conventional sense, you know - a director controls something so he can make his point. You'll never get that! So you've just got to go with it and see what you get when it comes out in the end!" he said, laughing.

"I went mad, really. I shot on my days off," he said. "All the Western crew went home, and I kept going with the Indian crew, and eventually Christian [Colson], the producer, went home. He said, 'The only way I'm going to get you to leave is, I'm going home and closing all the accounts.' And he left, and I had to leave a few days later. But I would have kept going, because it doesn't ever feel like you've completed a film there. You're kidding yourself if you think you've ever finished it."