SHOOTING SLUMDOG
The arrival of the crew in India not only made a huge impact on the locals, but was also a culture shock for the team who were yet to experience the madness and energy of Mumbai. "I'd never been to India," says Boyle.  "My dad was there in the war and had talked to me endlessly about it and I'd always wanted to go.    I thought it was an extraordinary place in the extremes that you experience there.  But, more importantly, the challenges that you face are just beyond anything you can imagine," he laughs.
Boyle believes that most filmmaking experiences centre on the concept of control - the idea that a director and crew can manipulate their environment to obtain exactly the imagery or visual tone they need to deliver what they've set out to film.  But in India those rules couldn't be applied.  "You just don't have that kind of control in India.  If you seek it, it will drive you insane. You'll be jumping off a cliff within a week.  You've got to go with it really, and just see what happens.  Some days you think, "We're never going to get anything - not a single thing."  And suddenly at four o'clock in the afternoon, it comes back to you - the place will repay you - if you've trusted it, and it all makes sense." 
Beaufoy had travelled extensively in India when he was eighteen but noticed enormous changes on his return twenty years later.  "India has changed massively since then so my research was focussed on wandering around and picking up stories and picking up the newspapers.  The most lurid, melodramatic stories would leap off the page. I'd read one and go and visit the area and soak up this extraordinary atmosphere and then start weaving the stories around that."
"I don't think when you're in the middle of something you necessarily find it extraordinary. It's only once you step out and look back on something with perspective, you can see it as extraordinary.  I don't think people living in Mumbai see Mumbai as extraordinary.  When we fly in from Britain and see the city we find it absolutely incredible and I think that's what Danny and I and Christian bring to it, as outsiders, is an open mouthed sense of awe."
The production agreed on a pre-shoot strategy that allowed them to begin filming around the city in advance of the agreed official start of shoot date.  While the different departments prepared for the shoot, Boyle and a skeleton crew began filming rehearsals as proper 'takes', in order to maximise the amount of shooting time they had in India.
Boyle suggested that rather than hold rehearsals in a free space, they would travel to the intended locations and film the rehearsals, hoping that some of the takes could be used in the edit.  "It was a great way of just getting into making the film," says Colson. We essentially started filming two weeks early.  Everyone's there.  The equipment's there.  We were on the ground near the location, so we actually started shooting."  It gave the production departments the opportunity to iron out any logistical or creative issues very early on, which not only created more time during the official shooting schedule, but also give them time to shoot any additional material needed.
"Obviously it helps everybody," says Colson.  "So often in films, during the first week of shooting, everybody's remembering how to make a movie.  It's been a while since they made one and maybe a little rusty.  So the great advantage of this process is, if it hadn't worked out, we'd not lost anything and if it did work out, well, we were ahead of the game, so it was a smart thing for Danny to do."
Boyle also felt that the film's lead Dev Patel would benefit from spending time in Mumbai before the cameras rolled and invited the young actor to come along on several location scouts.  For Patel, the experience helped him build up a profile of the character outside of the script's structure, as well as allowing him the chance to refine his accent.
"I really wanted to play a scene when I was actually in the depths, in the slums, immersed in that environment," says Patel.  "Being on the locations really helped me to build a background for my character and see where he's grown up.  In one location Danny saw a few kids playing the drums on the street. They were preparing for the Ganesha Festival.  Danny told me to turn my T-shirt inside out, because I had a big logo on it, and said, "Go and join them!"  I said, "What?!" and he said, "Just go and join them."  They got me in. They got someone to translate, put the drum on me and I started drumming.  And Anthony, the cameraman came in with a small DigiCam and just started filming it, without attracting too much attention to himself."
The Tulip Star, an abandoned five star hotel in Mumbai - "A very creepy place" according to Colson - was located near the production & Boyle suggested that they take the actors in and shoot the scene there.  "It wasn't scripted to be an empty hotel, it was scripted to be a fully functioning hotel," he explains.  "It just gave those scenes an added layer of poignancy.  So we kept it in and saved two days on the schedule that we then used up shooting other stuff."
When Boyle first arrived in Mumbai the mixture of absolute poverty and the country's huge technical advancement fascinated him.  "I've been to slums before but in different places in the world, like Kibera in Kenya but this was like … there's this smell you get first of all… this incredible mixture of our excrement (it belongs to all of us) and then saffron.  It's just this mixture of the sweet and the sour," he laughs.  "What is extraordinary about India is that it's one of the world's leading nuclear powers. It's got nuclear weapons.  So it's in the top six or eight nuclear powers in the world.  But on the other hand, there are no public toilets."
The crew shot in India's largest slum - Dharavi, and in one of its most vibrant, Juhu - situated next to the airport and to the west of the city and clearly visible by anyone flying into Mumbai.  The population levels are estimated to be more than 1 million in that area alone.  Mumbai's metropolitan population of 22 million (including the outskirts) is expanding at an alarming rate with estimates that it will be more than 20 million by 2020. The crew spent time filming in and around the slum areas Dharavi and near the Mahim creek, which is fed by a giant pipeline running through the centre of the slums.
"We put as many of those real slum-dwelling people in the film as we could get," says Boyle.  "It's actually a thriving, bustling mini-metropolis.  Now, in fact, what's happened, because India is a democracy, is that the slums have become incredibly powerful places politically because they have a lot of people in them.  There are a lot of votes in a small area. So that they actually become, ironically, incredibly powerful and actually a lot of people don't want the slums cleared. There's a big plan to clear Dharavi at the moment but a lot of those who live there don't want it cleared. They're very suspicious of what they'll be given in its place.
"Because of the scarcity of land in Mumbai, they'll probably be moved out to what's called New Mumbai, New Bombay, which is miles away and where they don't want to live.  What's important to them is not so much sophisticated dwellings, it's actually community.  It's that they live together and they support and help each other.  They have huge extended families of cousins and uncles…  So it's a real challenge for their politicians to try and find a way of updating the standards of living and yet retaining people's demand for close communities."
Technically the locations and bustle associated with every area the production visited meant that Boyle and his camera department, including the award-winning director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, had to consider several camera options and shooting methods.  The crew was originally planning to shoot certain scenes using highly advanced SI-2K digital cameras and shoot the rest of the movie on film, but Boyle was adamant that he did not want to take large and somewhat cumbersome 35mm cameras into the slums.  The smaller, more flexible digital cameras enabled them to shoot quickly with much less disturbance to the local communities.
For Boyle, it was down to trial and error to find the right process.  "We started off using classical kinds of film cameras and I didn't like it.  I wanted to feel really involved in the city.  I didn't want to be looking at it, examining it.  I wanted to be thrown right into the chaos as much as possible.  There's a period of time between about 2am and 4am where it all stops and just the dogs move around, but other than that, the place is just a tide of humanity."
The chase sequences at the beginning of the film in particular were filmed incrementally, built up, like a montage over a period of time.  Whenever possible, the crew would return to the location and film another section of the chase.  "Anthony was able to kind of hand hold them [the SI-2Ks].  Although they had this gyro on them, which was stabilising them, they were still very small and they could operate in very small, narrow areas, which is what you get in the slums.  You can capture a bit of the life that's going on around you, without people realising it and becoming self-conscious.  We also used what we called a 'CanonCam', which was a Canon stills camera, which takes twelve frames a second.  If people see a stills camera, they don't think it is recording live action.  So we'd record stuff like that, as well as occasionally using the traditional film camera.  So it's a mixture of different technologies that we used in the film."
"Whoever was operating the camera would have a hard drive strapped to their back, which would record the images while the camera was in their hand.  Anthony would look like a rather cumbersome tourist from Denmark who was wandering around the slums," laughs Boyle.  "But actually what he was doing was filming."
"Wherever we could, we shot real locations and we shot what was scripted and what was scripted was often pretty complex and took us to a fabulous range of different places," says Colson.  "The film's a fairy tale and like all the best fairy tales, it's got light and shade.  So, one minute we are at the Taj Mahal, which is one of the most beautiful places you will ever see and then we're at some pretty rough places too. it was quite an odyssey."
Victoria Terminus, in the heart of Mumbai is one of the enduring marks left by the Raj.  The crew filmed the dance sequence there, which appears over the end credits.  "The railways are the lifeblood of India, really," explains Boyle.  "There's an extraordinary number of people killed each day on the railways: people hang off the trains because they are so packed.  People live and work alongside the railway too.  They have this amazing technique to dry their clothes. They put a stone on each corner and, as the train comes by, it blows hot wind underneath the clothes and they literally dry in five minutes.  But it's very dangerous.  They're so close to the trains as they speed past."
One of the most difficult scenes was filming the young children jumping off the train.  "That was very, very, tough.  We had a very good stunt guy who dealt with this. But the lives of the kids were absolutely in his hands. He did a brilliant job for us really, but it was tough."
Finding locations and being granted access was a logistical challenge for the location scouts and support from the team's Indian connections was vital.  A local production company India Take One brought its knowledge to the production, enabling the team to very quickly map out how they would move swiftly from one location to the next.  But distance is not always the biggest issue in India.  With millions of cars, rickshaws and taxis vying for the roads, traffic jams are as much a part of daily life as eating and sleeping.
"One of our challenges, unanticipated really, was that we'd look at the map before we went out and thought, "We'll be in this hotel and we'll shoot this location. It's only a couple of miles away".  And it could take two hours to get there," recalls Colson.  "It was so congested. It's a bit like New York at its most manic."
Overall, the support systems for filming in Mumbai were far more advanced than the production had originally imagined.  Although chaotic to a degree, Colson is clear to point out that facilities were available across all aspects of the production process.  "Mumbai is a world centre for filmmaking.  The facilities are first class.  There are fantastic crews, studio space, telecine houses.  It's all there and in that sense, we've been able to come here and operate as one normally would.
"I guess some of the challenges, specific challenges we've faced, have been of our own making, in as much as we have elected to shoot the vast majority of this movie in real locations, on the streets of one of the most densely populated and chaotic cities on earth.  We had a few problems in Agra, where some of the local boys who sell to the tourists there, felt that we were possibly maligning their reputation.  So we moved on, made our apologies."
The fast-changing cityscapes around Mumbai created further challenges.  Locations that had been sourced months before had in many cases changed so dramatically, that alternative areas had to be found.
Beaufoy's early research visits allowed him to note key locations around the city where he imagined a scene.  "I'd think, "Right, that is a fantastic location" and six months later I'd go back with Danny and say, "Look at this fantastic… Oh!  It's gone.  Here in the UK, we couldn't get an escalator on the underground fixed in six months.  And yet over there, they've built entire mega cities in that time.  We really wanted to get that sense of a city just burning itself up with energy, people, money, dust and dirt, and most of all, the movement of people."
Indian call centres have received a considerable amount of press coverage over recent years and have become synonymous with customer service systems and for being the most common line of communication between the brand and consumer.  But in Slumdog Millionaire, Beaufoy and Boyle have used the call centre to drive a very important plot line, taking Jamal from Chai-wallah (teaboy) to contestant on the show.
Boyle explains - "Jamal goes round serving the tea in a call centre, and, of course, because he's bright, he's picking up all the info. He learns that the guy who put the system in (the telephone answering system) on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' is actually the guy who has installed this call centre as well.  He makes friends with him and finds out how you ring up and get on the show. So that's where he gets his knowledge from and that's very subtly sewn into the film and answers that question."
We were very lucky to get the star Mia Arulpragasam (MIA), whose song Paper Planes appears in the film and who also recorded a track for us with the composer, A. R. Rahman.  Afterwards, she watched the film and said to me, "I loved it but how did Jamal actually get on the TV show?"  We had cut that material, which is why she asked that question.  So we put that scene back in.  Occasionally you get really good notes from people who've not seen it.  They sit through a viewing of it and they say one thing to you and you think, "Of course. Yeah.  I've been too ignorant about that" or "I've been too sophisticated about that".

THE CAST AND CHARACTERS

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