The story of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE unfolds in Mumbai (AKA Bombay), one of the densest, wildest, fasting moving cities in the world, rife with both danger and magic, dreams and despair, luxury and poverty -- the city that author Suketu Mehta memorably dubbed the “maximum city” in his novel of the same name, a symbol of the vastly diverse megalopolises of the future in which the fates of rich and poor will be closely intertwined. With a population of over 19 million and rapidly growing, Mumbai is set to replace Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020 according to estimates. It is already the world’s most crowded city, with some 30,000 people pressed into every square kilometer of space. And though it features luxury shopping, sun-soaked beaches and hip nightlife, it is also a city where as many of 50% of the citizens live in shantytowns, ghettoes or on the streets.
For Danny Boyle, the challenge was to capture the light and dark contrasts of the city with fresh eyes – creating a visceral, immediate experience for audiences, immersing them in its sweltering heat and teeming corridors. His plan was to shoot in the heart of the city’s infamous but rarely explored slums, capturing their energy and urgency on-the-fly, with an unforced realism. As a newcomer, his own emotional reactions to his first forays into the city became part and parcel of the film’s design. “I thought it was an extraordinary place in the extremes that you experience there. But also, the challenges that you face are just beyond anything you can imagine,” he adds.
Mumbai’s high-contrast mix of heartbreaking poverty and technological advancement especially fascinated Boyle. “I’ve been to slums before but in different places in the world, like Kibera in Kenya, but this was different in all its contradictions. There’s this smell you get first of all… this incredible mixture of excrement and then saffron, a mixture of the sweet and the sour,” he laughs. “India’s one of the world’s leading nuclear powers on the one hand, but on the other hand, there are no public toilets.”
All of these observations and sensations became part of the intensely textured fabric of the film. Says Simon Beaufoy: “I don’t think people living in Mumbai see Mumbai as extraordinary. But what Danny, Christian and I were able to bring to it, as outsiders, is an open mouthed sense of awe.”
Christian Colson notes that the production purposefully left the beaten path behind. “Some of the specific challenges we faced were of our own making, in as much as we 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,” he says.
Mumbai itself dictated the pulsing rhythm of the film. Boyle has always been a director who cleverly manipulates the environment around him to create mood and atmosphere – but in India that kind of control just doesn’t exist, he notes. “If you seek it, it will drive you insane,” remarks Boyle. “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. This place will repay you, if you trust it.”
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, in order to maximize the amount of shooting time they had in India. “It was a great way of just getting into making the film,” says Colson. “We essentially started filming two weeks early. Everyone was there. The equipment was there. We were on the ground near the location, so we actually started shooting.”
Boyle also felt that the film’s lead, Dev Patel, who stars as Jamal, 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 better understand the character and where he came from.
“I really wanted to have a chance 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 Jamal and see where he’d 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 DP, came in with a small DigiCam and just started filming it, without attracting too much attention to himself.”
The production shot in Dharavi, Mumbai’s so-called “mega-slum,” with its staggeringly diverse population of more than 1 million, an infamous mafia that controls everything from land to water, and a landscape forged from corrugated tin buildings, red asbestos roofs, mountainous garbage and non-stop human activity. They also shot in the city’s most vibrant shantytown, the Juhu slum, which is situated next to the airport and clearly visible to anyone flying into Mumbai. There, they plunged themselves and their cameras into the hubbub of everyday life and learned a lot about how this world operates with its own rules and underlying sense of honor.
“We put as many real slum-dwelling people in the film as we could get,” says Boyle. “The slums are actually thriving, bustling mini-metropolises. 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. 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.”
He continues: “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.”
The task of shooting amidst the bustle of these ramshackle cities-within-the-city fell to award-winning director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, who most recently shot the Oscar®-winning LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, and has previously worked with Boyle shooting 28 DAYS LATER and MILLIONS. Mantle had to be extremely flexible in his shooting methods. The crew originally planned 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, 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 came down to trial and error to find the right shooting 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,” he explains. “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 hyperkinetic chase sequence involving the young Jamal and Salim at the beginning of the film, in particular, was 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 hand hold the SI-2Ks,” recalls Boyle. “Although they had a gyro on them to stabilize them, they were still very small and 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 realizing it and becoming self-conscious.”
Boyle continues: “We also used what we called a ‘CanonCam,’ which was a Canon stills camera, which takes twelve frames a second. If people see a still camera, they don’t think it is recording live action. 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.”
Other memorable locations included the historic 19th Century train station known as Victoria Terminus or VT (aka Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), in the heart of Mumbai, where the crew also filmed the final dance sequence that runs over the end credits. Trains are a visual motif throughout the film. “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 to film was that of the young children jumping off a speeding train right outside the splendorous Taj Mahal, which they mistake for heaven. “That was very, very, tough. We had a very good stunt guy who dealt with this. The lives of the kids were absolutely in his hands. He did a brilliant job for us really, but it was tough,” comments Boyle.
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 Productions, 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 necessarily 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 – and must be accounted for in scheduling.
“One of our challenges, unanticipated really, was that we’d look at the map before we went out and think ‘We’ll shoot this location, it’s only a couple of miles away’ – but it could take two hours to get there,” recalls Colson. “It was so congested. It’s like New York at its most manic.”
Overall, however, the support systems for filmmaking 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 center for filmmaking. The facilities are first class. There are fantastic crews, studio space, telecine houses. It’s all there,” he says.
But the fast-changing cityscapes around Mumbai were continuously challenging. Locations that had been sourced mere months before had, in many cases, changed so dramatically that alternative areas had to be found. Simon Beaufoy was amazed at how much the city’s look had altered since his early research visits. “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. But we used all of this. 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.”
For Boyle and the rest of the team, this meant seamlessly merging the production as much as possible with the daily hustle-and-bustle of a city filled with constant suspense and a tangle of human stories – including Jamal’s astonishing journey towards a life he never could have imagined.
Sums up Colson: “The film’s a fairy tale and like all the best fairy tales, it’s got light and shade. So, one minute we were at the Taj Mahal, which is one of the most beautiful places you will ever see, and the next we were at some incredibly tough places. It was quite an odyssey for Danny and for all of us.”
