Backstage Interview Transcript | 81st Academy Awards
Adapted screenplay
CATEGORY: Adapted screenplay
INTERVIEW WITH: Simon Beaufoy
FILM: "Slumdog Millionaire"
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A. Hello. Thank you.
Q. Hello.
A. Hi.
Q. Is it starting to become real, this SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE "express" that we've been witnessing over the last, you know, number of months now, that you've got this thing in your hand? Are you starting to feel like, "Oh, my gosh, it really is all that"?
A. I'm sure it's a real shock to actually have this in your hands; very heavy. And it's a kind of icon I can image of cinema. Suddenly, SLUMDOG, which was this little Indie film, for a while, nobody really wanted it. Then, suddenly, in
the you know, it's going to be, it's sort of in the halls of fame now. As soon as you get one of these, it's written up on the walls of this this place, which is just extraordinary.
Q. Hi, Simon.
A. Hello. How are you?
Q. I'm well. Thank you.
A. Good.
Q. Congratulations. All the kids are over from Mumbai. What's it been like having them here? I saw them running around in the red carpet getting autographs, you mentioned pointedly in your speech.
A. Oh, dear. You know, what we were so worried about bringing them over in case it seemed incredibly inappropriate to bring over from where they live to the most kind of lavish ceremony there is for films. And, actually, they're completely cool about it. We're all worried and they're all running around, having a laugh. And it's fantastic being nine because you don't really have stress or tension. They're just having fun. So it's a in the end, it was absolutely the right thing to do, to bring them over, because they're just having a lot of fun.
Q. How will you celebrate tonight?
A. I suspect it will be a very long evening and we'll celebrate every way we can. It's been great.
Q. When the original material is not yours hi. How are you? When the original material is not yours, how do you turn the story and make it yours and put your spin on it?
A. I think you have to be very bold. And in some respects, you have to be kind of willfully disrespectful to material. You have to put it away, put the book away, and do your own thing with it. Because I've learned over the years that the worst thing you can do is be very respectful to the material and kind of transliterate from book to screen. It's such a different medium. You have to take the core of it and then change everything around it and keep I would say if you keep the soul of it the same, then you succeeded. But everything on the periphery will change. And I always say that to the novelist if I'm adapting a novel. I always say, "Everything will change, but I promise to keep the soul of your novel the same."
A. Hello.
Q. Congratulations.
A. Thank you.
Q. Is there this movie had such a troubled history with the dropout of Warner Independent Pictures, and then Fox picking it up. What was going through your mind, as the screenwriter, through all of that? Were you abreast? Was Danny keeping you aware of everything?
A. Yeah. He's an incredibly collaborative director. There are a lot of directors who pretend to be collaborative; he's the one that actually is. So I was there at every cut of film; I was there the whole time, from casting all the way through. And there were three or four very worrying months when we had no U.S. distributor. And I worried enough it was just when the film was coming good. We shot a lot of material; the first cuts were sort of three hours long. It was hard to see the film coming together. And then, just as the film came together, Warner Independent closed.
So it was a very tough time. But the thing about what really happened, funny enough, you being from Canada, it is the Toronto Film Festival, where we suddenly realized that we had a good film on our hands just from the response of the audience in Toronto. We hadn't shown it to an audience until Toronto, and it was there that it all started taking off. So we have Canada to thank for that.
Q. You've talked a lot about how, before you wrote the screenplay, you were an oppressed Brit who could never have written something like this before you visited India. Is there a permanent change now? Are you going to be able to write this one with a love story from now on?
A. It was a response to the place, really. Mumbai is a very operatic, melodramatic place. And one blink of an eye, you could see the most beautiful woman walk past you in a sari pulled by a person with no arms or legs on a skateboard, begging, in one single movement. And it's a place of massive extremes. And so I just responded to that and started writing with these kinds of extremes, because it seemed appropriate to the place.
Q. Does that mean you would not be able to do that again
A. Well, put in this way: I don't know whether you could have made this film in any other city but Mumbai. It has that warmth, that incredible generosity, as well as a kind of the exact opposite of that. It's kind of a very brutal place, on the other hand. And you can see both of those. It kind of every time you look anywhere, you see both of those things, in one eyeful, if you like. So I couldn't have written this film from New York or London or Paris. It would have been a different film; it wouldn't have had these extremes of brutality and warmth. Put all together with the song and dance sequence and everything else, you can't [inaudible] any other city in the world, I don't think, with the same kind of massive changes that you can in Mumbai.
Q. Two questions: One of the beads you're wearing there, is that from Mumbai?
A. Yeah.
Q. And you said you learned film making a lot of a lot about film making in India. How was that?
A. I learned to stop being English about things like love. If you make a film in England about love, it's hugely complicated. It's all about marriage therapy; it's all about subtext. It's all about saying what the weather is like, and you're secretly telling someone you love them. You know what the English are like; they're very repressed people. Let's be honest; you don't get that in India. India is incredibly uncynical about love. It's a not a complicated thing. You don't have to go to marriage counseling for five years to get your marriage on track. It's me/you, love. Let's go. It's, like, so straightforward and full of romance. Utterly uncynical response to romance. I just thought it was so wonderful, I thought if I could put that back into a western film; that totally naive heart on your sleeve which is a very simple, direct communication from me to you.
Forget about the rest of things, of life; that was just wonderful. I thought we lost that in our cinema. We've transferred it to sort of superhero movies; that's where the kind of melodrama and opera and the passion is in western cinema. It's in Batman, Superman, old western films. I felt, well, you could do it in a live action film that was but people, but only in a place like India, really, with old Hollywood cinema is about that, just the heart.
Q. What about the beads?
A. The beads are by a very beautiful man who dressed my wife for the evening. And as he was walking out the door, he just gave these to me and said, "They're good luck beads and they work." Wonderful. Roberto de Villa (phonetic), who makes beautiful costumes.
Q. Spanish?
A. Half Ecuadorian and half Norwegian, mysteriously.
Q. Congratulations.
A. Hello.
Q. I'm just wondering with all the success and the very agreeable response to the movie that's come out, what's been the more surprising response that you've seen to your work?
A. The most surprising, I suppose it's what's happening in India in terms of cinema. I've been contacted by a lot of Indian actors and directors who say, "Finally. We don't have to make a film about the middle classes getting married and have five song and dance sequences in front of the French Alps. We can do something else now." And we've taken quite a lot of flack for showing the slums of Mumbai and showing a side of India that Bollywood just simply just didn't look at. It's not a criticism, it's just not their genre at all to look towards the working classes and the poor of India. They just don't do that in the cinema.
And the fact that we did, and mainstream audiences in India are going to see this film, I sort of opened up a new cinematic pathway for Indian directors. At least, that's what they're telling me. So that could be incredibly exciting. If you get all these immensely talented directors and actors in India work, that whole new feel, if you can get Hollywood and Bollywood combined, you got a whole new genre of cinema, and that, to me, is an amazing the potential is amazing.
Q. I want to ask you why you think this film has a connection. I mean, you write stories to get people moved to tell a story that people are interested in. What are the magic parts of this story that really make people like this story? You think it's the "moral of the story," maybe?
A. It's a mythic story; it's a search. It's like an Arthurian question, deeply buried in our DNA as human beings, I think. It's a search for someone, I think, that appeals to people. But, also, it's come out at a very interesting time, and none of us could have anticipated that. It's come out at a time when the value of money which has been raised to this extraordinary height is suddenly being shown to be a kind of very shallow thing. The financial markets are crashing around the world and a film comes out which is ostensibly about being a millionaire. Actually, what it's about, it's a film that says there's more important things than money: love, faith, and family. And that struck a chord with people, I think, right now. In an era where we suddenly turn around and go, "Wait a minute, this money thing, it's been shown to be a real false idol." And so that the timing of when this film came out had a tremendous impact.
Q. Congratulations.
A. Thank you very much.
Q. Going back to the magic of this movie, in the last few months, during award season, the whole cast, the crew, everyone, you guys have been like a such a family. And this is sort of the end of the road tonight. How are you going to keep this family together? Is this bond going to endure?
A. It's very we spent the last four months together every week, one way or another. We've been on the road with somebody, or a lot of us, depending. And the whole film is made in a very collaborative way, and that's something I mean, I hope Danny will be up here later for you to talk about that. He's an incredibly collaborative director, so you feel like you're part of a family, and you feel you have a responsibility to that family, and so it's a going to be very strange. It will all dissipate. You know, I know the cast are off in other movies, and we're incredibly pleased at somebody like Dev to be on this big movie. He's doing martial arts and things; his career is fine. Now, we're just delighted to have him, and the same way is that little bit of you going, "Oh, you're leaving us behind." So, inevitably, you want the thing to stay together and last forever, but the circus moves on.
Q. Thank you so much. Congratulations.
A. Thank you. Thank you very much.
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