On Movies: Danny Boyle, 'hijacked' by 'Slumdog' script

A plot that pivots on the TV show

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Danny Boyle

wasn't interested.

Then he saw the name on the script -

Simon Beaufoy

, who had written

The Full Monty

- and the busy British filmmaker figured he'd take a quick look.

"I've watched the show, obviously," recalls Boyle. "It was invented in England, and it was a huge success and everybody watched it - but there was no way I wanted to make a film about it.

"But I started reading it because Simon had written it . . . and, yeah, I was hijacked by the script. You just know after about 10 pages that you're going to do it.

"I remember reading the first page of the

Trainspotting

book and having that same feeling, just thinking we're going to make a film of this, I don't care what the 358 other pages are like! It's weird the way that works. . . . Everybody assumes it's a choice, but it's not. The best ones aren't. They're inevitable."

And so

Slumdog Millionaire

- a crazy-quilt epic about a Mumbai street kid who grows up and gets on the Indian version of the game show, where he keeps answering the questions correctly - became, for Boyle, a matter of fate. Or as his cacophonous, bloody, romantic, English-Hindi hybrid begins and ends:

It is written.

Playing at the Ritz East and the Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ, and expanding to more theaters in the coming weeks,

Slumdog Millionaire

came away from the Toronto International Film Festival in September with the Audience Award for best film - and Oscar buzz.

"Jagged" filmmaking is how Boyle describes

Slumdog

. The movie

, which stars

Dev Patel

as the young hero (and two amazing kids as the character in boyhood and adolescence), captures the wealth and poverty, the cruelty and grace, the beauty and squalor of the South Asian nation as it becomes a global force in the 21st century.

"You've got these incredible disparities," says Boyle, who spent nearly a year in India on the project. "Whatever happens, there are always these enormous opposites at the same time. It's just built like that. . . . So you can't have a smooth film, because it's just not a smooth kind of place. Everything's bang straight next to each other, nothing's hidden from you."

Apart from providing a street-level view of one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world,

Slumdog

- which Beaufoy adapted from the

Vikas Swarup

novel

Q & A

- is a great adventure, and a pulsing romance, too.

For Boyle, the experience of making a film in India with a small crew, on a small budget ($13 million that looks like $50 million), with high-definition digital video cameras turned out to be a life-changing experience. Suddenly those "odd words" like

serendipity

and

destiny

began to make sense.

"I had not had a lot of respect or time for those ideas, but you begin to appreciate [them] a bit," he says, in town recently and having lunch at a Center City hotel. "And serendipitous things did just happen on the film constantly. You think, how is that happening?"

Boyle, 52, lives in London. His films have jumped genres, from macabre comedy (

Shallow Grave

) to druggie madness (

Trainspotting

) to a kid-centric Christmas tale (

Millions

), spiritualized sci-fi (

Sunshine

) and zombie plagues (

28 Days Later

. . .). He did a big-budget

Leo DiCaprio

Hollywood pic, too -

The Beach

. It was shot in Thailand, and was not a happy time.

"I did

The Beach

in the wrong way," Boyle acknowledges. "I took hundreds of people, and it's not the way to make those films. Bad decision. Basically, no matter what your intentions, no matter how PC you are, you're basically an invading army, you're just going there, you're muscling in. And if you have any problems you just send for more army."

Lesson learned. On

Slumdog

, Boyle brought 10 people with him from London, and recruited the rest of his staff and crew from Bollywood's bustling ranks. His Indian casting director,

Loveleen Tandan

, turned out to be so key to the project - directing the non-English-speaking cast, shooting second unit - that he ended up giving her a codirector credit.

In the savvy hands of Fox Searchlight - which inherited the film after Warner Independent Pictures was shuttered this spring -

Slumdog

, like its protagonist, seems an unlikely contender for fame and glory. But as the awards season nears, things are looking good for Boyle's scrappy underdog. The Oscar talk seems, suddenly, not so far-fetched.

"You have to be honest - I think everybody dreams about stuff like that," Boyle says. "You dream and dream, you can't not do. And when anything gets dangled in front of you, you dream it all the more intensely. But you also have to remain realistic about it as well. Because we never made it with that in mind. You can imagine, it's the furthest thing from your mind - although the Indian crew did used to say, because it's so far away from Hollywood and they love Hollywood, they'd go, 'Oh, this will definitely get an Oscar. . . .' It was laughable."

He adds, "I think we'll be at the back of the hall waving, I expect. If we do get in the hall at all.

"Especially with a film like this. It's such a faraway place, and there are such strange things in it. . . . But this is the time of the year when odd things are allowed into the room, really."

Philly film architecture.

Greater Philadelphia Film Office head

Sharon Pinkenson

will talk Tuesday evening on the important role historic architecture plays in this area's modern-day moviemaking. Citing, among other Philly phlicks,

Rocky

,

12 Monkeys

,

National Treasure

, and

The Sixth Sense

, Pinkenson will examine the connections between production and preservation, the lure of the city's historic architecture, its adaptability and overall importance in selling Philadelphia as a location.

The talk will be at the AIA Center for Architecture, 1218 Arch St., 6 p.m. Tuesday. Preservation Alliance members $15; nonmembers $20. Phone: 215-546-1146, Ext. 3, or e-mail

» READ MORE: info@preservationalliance.com