ON THIS PAGE:  DEVELOPING THE SCREENPLAY FROM THE BOOK/ THE DIRECTOR AND WRITERS

Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's ''Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?'  Arrested on suspicion of cheating, he tells the police the incredible story of his life on the streets, and of the girl he loved and lost. But what is a kid with no interest in money doing on the show? And how is it he knows all the answers?  

Developing the screenplay from the book
The genesis of Slumdog Millionaire began when the Head of Film and Drama at Channel 4, Tessa Ross, received a call from Film4's book scout, Kate Sinclair, who explained that she'd read a proof of an extraordinary story.  Although yet to be published, when Sinclair pitched the story, Ross immediately optioned the book.
"Between optioning the book and it being published I had organised a dinner for writers, directors and producers and I spoke to Simon Beaufoy, who I'd known for a long time and was very keen to work with, and told him about our 'prize project'", Ross recalls.  "He absolutely loved the idea and came onboard very quickly."
Ross suggested that, although the book was difficult to convert into a screenplay, she felt Beaufoy had the skill and experience to do it.  Beaufoy believed that most Western cinemagoers had not previously experienced the side of India that Swarup's book explores.  "It's like a city in fast-forward," he says.  "It's Dickensian London in the 21^st century.  It's rapidly developing.  The poor are poorer than ever before.  The rich are richer than ever before.  And there's this mass of people in the middle, trying to force their way up."
The simple premise of Swarup's novel enabled Beaufoy to concentrate on two key elements when adapting the story into a screenplay.  Firstly, the obvious rags to riches fairytale, where our hero overcomes enormous obstacles to reach a positive conclusion.  Secondly, the extraordinary backdrop against which the story is set.  But there were many technical difficulties.  The adaptation of a book into a film script requires a very different approach for a writer than producing an original screenplay.  The challenge for Beaufoy was to retain the soul of the book, but at the same time, translate those characters onto the big screen. 
"The biggest problem in converting the book to a screenplay was that it was effectively a series of stories - twelve short stories," Beaufoy explains.  "Some of which weren't even linked in any way. It had no over-arching narrative. It didn't take someone from birth all the way through life. It was rather disjointed and some of the stories were almost discreet little tales that had no reference to the main characters at all.  It's very different to starting with one's own idea and developing it.  With an adaptation you've got responsibilities to the book. It is like unpacking a suitcase that has been delivered, with a jumble of things that fit and things that don't fit.  It's not my suitcase.  It's someone else's suitcase.  But somehow you have to turn that into a suitcase of your own making."
Beaufoy meticulously picked his way through the narratives to mark out a story that would take the audience from A to B.  "My job was to find this narrative… to trace a story that went all the way through, while still being able to jump back to the story of the police interrogation and 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' That was a particular challenge."
The film's producer Christian Colson believes Beaufoy was an inspired choice of writer.  "Simon has a very warm, specific voice which is particularly suited to this material," Colson says.  "He wrote a first draft of the screenplay for Tessa in the first instance and then they came to me."
"Simon came up with the new title of "Slumdog Millionaire", which we all fell in love with.  I guess in classical terms the story a comedy in so far as it describes a movement from disorder towards harmony.  It's a comedy but it's also, at times, a horrifying drama.  There are moments of great pain and pathos. It's a fairytale and like all the best fairytales, it has moments of real darkness and horror.  There is a great mix of things that really make you laugh and make you cry and make you gasp."
Beaufoy believes that having Jamal in the TV show and then jumping to flashbacks of his life enables the stand-alone segments to offer a mixture of genres.  "You can fire off in all different directions.  You can have a little romantic bit, a little comedy bit or a little gangster bit and still somehow encapsulate them all in a single tone, which was lovely for me.  It gives the film a great deal of variety because it's not stuck in one genre."
When the script was in good enough shape to take to a director, the team's number one choice was Danny Boyle. "We sat down and asked ourselves who would be the best person in the world to direct this material and just thought 'Danny Boyle!," Colson recalls.  "We sent it to him, he read it and said 'Count me in'," says Colson.  "It was that easy."
Beaufoy was impressed with Boyle's respect for the script, as well as his approach to the material.  Although the director is regarded by many as unmistakable in his directing style and approach to filmmaking, his attitude to each scene was to maintain the dialogue as written.  "He understands the rhythm of a scene.  He wants to keep it that way and he still manages to get his own absolutely unique vision across. It's unmistakably a Danny Boyle film and yet pretty much every word that I wrote is there in the film.  He's incredibly respectful of the words on the page and won't do anything to the dialogue without a huge amount of consultation with the writer."
Equally, Boyle regarded Beaufoy's script as a guiding light through the filmmaking process.  In the heat of shooting under tight time constraints and challenging conditions, Boyle explains that it made sense to remain as faithful as possible to Beaufoy's blueprint.  "Simon came over to India for rehearsals and we made some adjustments then.  But most of the time we wanted to stick to the script as much as possible," says Boyle.  "I mean, inevitably things evolve and change but the script is like a tunnel you get into and the less detours you make when you're in it, the better.  You make it as vivid as you can and as complex and exciting as you can but you serve the narrative as much as possible."
In the world of film development, where projects can struggle to move forward, constantly facing re-writes, new writers, extensive notes and delays as other films move into production, Slumdog Millionaire's development arc was rapid.  "It was a snowball that grew as it rolled down a hill," Ross notes.  "Truly nothing stopped it in its tracks.  The snowball had a very direct path down that hill and it speeded up because of Danny.  We were able to develop and finance the film with Celador, and this meant we could then make all the important financial and creative decisions together very quickly."
But what can a Western production bring to what is essentially an Indian story?  Colson suggests that an outsider's perspective brings striking elements to the visual look of a film and the telling of a story that an indigenous writer or director might take for granted, or simply not notice.  "It's an outsider's perspective in the way that Sam Mendes did a great job portraying suburban America in American Beauty and Ang Lee did on Jane Austen's England in Sense and Sensibility.  I guess there's a fresh eye for the colourful, unique or vibrant that sometimes we, any of us, don't see in our own cultures.  There is certainly vibrancy to the movie that implies an outsider's curiosity .  I think we get very de-sensitised to the places where we live and sometimes don't look as closely.  As outsiders, we look differently."

DANNY BOYLE - Director
One of the UK's finest directors, Danny Boyle has a wide spectrum of critically acclaimed and commercially successful film credits: Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach, Alien Love Triangle, 28 Days Later, Millions and Sunshine. Slumdog Millionaire is his eighth international theatrically released film.

SIMON BEAUFOY - Writer
Simon Beaufoy trained at Bournemouth College of Art and Design as a documentary director then took to writing. His screenwriting credits include The Full Monty, Among Giants, The Darkest Light, Yasmin and This is Not a Love Song.  Filming has just finished on his latest script, two-part thriller, 'Burn Up', which is based around the politics of oil depletion and climate change. It premiered on BBC2 in June 2008, and starred Neve Campbell, Rupert Penry-Jones and Bradley Whitford.  After adapting Q and A (Slumdog Millionaire) Simon is now adapting the novel, 'The Raw Shark Texts' for Film4.

VIKAS SWARUP - Author
Vikas Swarup is a member of the Indian Foreign Service. Originally published as Q&A, Slumdog Millionaire was an international bestseller. It has been translated into thirty-five languages so far and a stage musical is in preparation. His new novel, Six Suspects, has also been optioned for film. It is currently available as a Doubleday hardback and is due to be published as a Black Swan paperback in February 2009.
Vikas Swarup was born in Allahabad (India) in a family of lawyers. After his schooling, Vikas attended Allahabad University and studied History, Psychology and Philosophy. He also made his mark as a champion debater, winning National level competitions. After graduating with distinction, he joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1986, motivated by an interest in international relations and a desire to explore different cultures. In his diplomatic career, Vikas has been posted to various countries such as Turkey (1987-1990), the United States (1993-1997) Ethiopia (1997-2000) and the United Kingdom (2000-2003). Since August 2006 he has been posted in Pretoria as India's Deputy High Commissioner.  Q&A is his first novel. Published by Doubleday/Random House (UK & Commonwealth), Harper Collins (Canada) and Scribner (US) it has been translated into 33 languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Taiwanese, Thai, and Hebrew. It was short listed for the Best First Book by the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and won South Africa's Exclusive Books Boeke Prize 2006. Film Four of the UK have optioned the movie rights and the movie titled 'Slum Dog Millionaire' is being directed by Danny Boyle. A West End musical with Nitin Sawhney providing the musical score, is in the works. A BBC radio play based on the book was aired recently on Radio 4 and won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony Radio Academy Awards 2008. Harper Collins have brought out the audio book, read by Kerry Shale, which won the award for Best Audio Book of the Year 2005.
Most recently, in March 2007, Vikas won the Paris Book Fair's Reader's Prize, the Prix Grand Public, for his novel Q&A in a poll by readers in some 400 French bookshops.
Vikas's second novel Six Suspects, published by Transworld, will be released on July 28, 2008.
Vikas has participated in the Oxford Literary Festival, the Turin International Book Fair, the Auckland Writers' Conference, the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Kitab Festival in New Delhi, the St. Malo International Book & Film Festival in France, and the 'Words on Water' Literary Festival at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg..
Apart from reading, Vikas enjoys listening to music and playing cricket, tennis and table tennis.


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