Mumbai

I know I keep quoting the Guardian incessantly... but this article is so well-written that it deserves mention.

I only took exception to this part "... I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music...". Kabhi Kabhie and Silsilay (to quote examples, among others) had awesome soulful music. Guess Bollywood isn't for everyone as Amrita says. Do read on.

Life on the hard shoulder

Only when he got lost in the slums of Mumbai did Simon Beaufoy understand what his latest script needed to be. He recalls the breathtaking inspiration for Slumdog Millionaire
Simon Beaufoy
The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008

Two weeks ago, two years after first visiting Mumbai, I watched the news footage of the terrorist attacks. A city that for me had become almost a fairytale character in a film had suddenly become prey to depressing reality. At VT station, where the director Danny Boyle staged the brazenly uplifting dance number that ends Slumdog Millionaire, lie lumps on the platform. Luggage and dead bodies. I suddenly wondered if we hadn't been seduced by the wonders of the city and made a rather naive film.

Slumdog Millionaire
Release: 2008
Country: UK
Runtime: 120 mins
Directors: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan
Cast: Amil Kapoor, Azharudin Mohammed Ismail, Dev Patel, Irrfan Khan, Rubina Ali
More on this film

Two years earlier, I am lost in the maze of alleys in Mumbai's Juhu slum, a network of dark passages a few feet across, pierced by arrows of sunlight. In these canyons I stumble across dogs, chickens, water pipes, open sewers and thousands of families. Everywhere I go, I am pursued by two dozen grubby Indian kids all pointing and laughing at my pink, sunburnt face. "Hey, Mr Bean, you hot?" says a 10-year old troublemaker. (One is either Mr Bean or Rambo to these children, and it didn't take them long to make their decision.) I agree that it is certainly hot. Uproarious laughter, delighted slapping of hands. I've clearly fallen into their trap. "No, Mr Bean! It's cool today!" The ankle-biters who aren't engaged in this good-natured humiliation look a bit sorry for me. Isn't the Rich White Tourist supposed to pity the Poor Indian Slum Dweller rather than the other way round? But not for a second does it occur to me to pity these giggling streaks of lightning charging around the slum taking the piss out of me with such broad smiles. Which is interesting. I must make a note of that. If I can ever find a way out of here.

I see light at the end of a long, dark alley, skip over the river of sewage running its length and finally pop out into sunshine and space. The children run after me, laughing even harder. "No, no, Mr Bean!" And now I see why. I have walked straight into the slum's toilets. But these are toilets as I've never seen them before. Rickety wooden piers stretch along and above the slum's massive rubbish dump. Perched at the end of each pier is a tiny shack with only three walls and a hole in the floorboards. Where the fourth wall should be is nothing but open air and a magnificent view of Juhu's private airfield. Every morning, the poorest people in the world sit doing their business watching the richest people in the world fly in to do their business. Nothing could sum up the Mumbai experience more perfectly. I didn't quite know how or why, but I was sure I had found the first scene of Slumdog Millionaire.

The galley proofs of Vikas Swarup's vibrant, sprawling novel, Q and A, had been given to me a few months earlier. There was something deeply intriguing about the premise of a slum kid winning the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Equally intriguing, but in film terms problematic, was the structure. Each chapter of the book explained how he happened to know the correct answer: in effect a series of short stories. But while some of the stories linked together, others fired off into fascinating but unconnected tangents. There was no single, unwavering arrow of narrative to take an audience all the way through apart from the game show. And somehow, a game show just wasn't enough for me.

I just can't get excited about money as a motivation in a film. It leaves me cold. My heart does not sing if the final shot of the film is a slum kid snapping on a Rolex, getting in his Porsche and driving off into the sunset. In fact, my heart sinks. So, how to make a rags to riches story that doesn't revolve around money? There was only one way to find out: go to Mumbai.

They say that if you get caught in an avalanche it is hard to know whether you are facing up or down when the tumbling stops. The Mumbai slums are like an avalanche of the senses - an excess of smell, noise, taste and colour. Once I've turned the first corner, I'm not sure which way I came in or how I'll ever get out. But in this avalanche, something becomes abundantly and wonderfully obvious. This film just has to be a love story.

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart. And of all things, only love can overwhelm the seductive narrative of money that threatens to swamp the story. The euphoria of this discovery is soon replaced by the frightening realisation that I will have to reinvent the whole journey of the central character, Jamal the slumdog. I will also have to create the love of his life, Latika, and make their love story, not the quiz show, the real crux of the film. But what does a middle-class white Englishman know of a Mumbai slumdweller's life story? Not much.

I decide that the only way to do this with any authenticity is to return to my documentary roots. Whereas screenwriters are always being told "write about what you know", documentary makers prefer to dig, investigate, deliberately court exactly what they don't know. For me, it is the best way to work. Where's the fun in writing about what you know, when you can instead dive headlong into the new, the exotic, the utterly unknown?

So, I wander the slums apparently aimlessly, chatting to the children, community leaders, school teachers, beggars, rag-pickers, picking up gossip from the tea-stalls, snippets from the papers, gathering a patchwork of stories that might, goodness knows how, knit together. A gangster trial is never off the front page of the Times of India. Hindu/Muslim tensions are bubbling up again and the gang of beggars at one of the road underpasses tell me as much as a Dickens novel ever could about the pay-scale of mutilation. Misshapen limbs good, blindness better. I am particularly fascinated by the men and women who sleep on the hard shoulder of the motorways, their heads on a bedding roll a heart-stopping three or four feet away from the wheels of thundering trucks driven by overworked, exhausted drivers. It would only take the minutest misjudgment of the wheel to annihilate entire families of sleepers - something that I later learn is not uncommon. I am wary of approaching them with intrusive questions, but as so often in this city, they are open, happy to talk and politely puzzled at my questions. Sure, they have a slum to go to at night, but it's an hour's walk: if they sleep here right next to the building site they get an extra two hours' work in. Isn't it obvious? To my questions about the noise and the fumes they give me that very Indian, side-to-side shake of the head, which means: maybe yes, maybe no, maybe you make up your own mind and stop asking stupid questions. It's certainly better than working on the fields in the countryside where they all came from and were slowly dying of malnutrition. As to whether they are worried that a truck will kill them, they smile and shrug. Whatever God wills.

Again and again, all my preconceptions are overturned. They may be living on the hard-shoulder of a motorway, but the last thing these people are looking for is pity. In this city of 19 million people hurtling into the future, there is still, very present, an ancient sense of destiny, a word I find hard to define - even though I seem to have written a film about it. The poor live right next to the rich without any of that western sense of entitlement, judgment or envy. There is a sense of rightness and understanding in whoever one is and whatever one is doing. Not passivity, but acceptance. I can barely explain it to myself, let alone convey it in a film. I can only try to carry my sense of it into the characters and their lives and resolve never for a single frame to elicit pity in the audience.

But this isn't just a factual and philosophical education. Something strange is happening to my writing. The usual, mealy-mouthed English nuance and subtext is being replaced by something that is bordering on melodrama. What use subtext in a city of such total extremes? Nuance doesn't stand a chance in the car horn symphony of a Mumbai traffic jam. So a torture scene is followed by a comedy toilet scene, the blinding of a child by a Buster Keatonesque stunt sequence. Tonally it really shouldn't work. In any other city in the world, I suspect it wouldn't work. But in Mumbai, not for nothing known as Maximum City, somehow I get away with it. And it is only a matter of time before the inevitable happens and a Bollywood song and dance number jumps into the script.

As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers. But 25 years later, sitting in one of Mumbai's aircraft hangar-sized cinemas, I finally understand. Twenty minutes into the film, everyone is still chatting away, a couple in front are having their dinner out of tin foil trays, their children charging up and down the aisles screaming, and most of the men are still shouting away on their cell phones. And then the song and dance number comes on. The projectionist cranks up the sound to an even more unsafe level, and I am hit with a wave of sound, colour and amazing dancing. The music is part traditional, part hip-hop, part disco. Just like the tone of my script, it's a ridiculous mixture that shouldn't work. But it is infectious beyond anything I have heard in years. I mischievously decide to write the end dance sequence on the platforms of VT station, Mumbai's equivalent of Waterloo station. That should keep the producers busy.

The structure of the book defeats me for weeks as I try to transform it into a script. The story constantly moves backwards and forwards in time. Three different timeframes: Jamal's recent past on the game show, Jamal's distant past and Jamal's present as he recounts the story of his life to the police inspector after his arrest. This jigsaw leaves me puzzled for weeks. I set myself the task to avoid any sense of flashbacks. No "10 years earlier" captions, no sepia tones. The past must be as real and as urgent as the present. All the time, I have director Danny Boyle's laconic advice hanging over me. "It's got to be Romeo and Juliet, otherwise, what's the point?"

After the terrorist attacks, I email the crew, hoping that everyone is okay. A flood of emails return. They are passionate, fervent, utterly unbowed. In the face of unsurpassed cynicism, the language is still romantic, fierce, proud. "A few drops of blood cannot stir the spirit of Mumbai and us Indians," I am told. I realise that the tone of Slumdog Millionaire wasn't in the end created by us film-makers but by the city itself. We were infused by a people that celebrate life unconditionally, in all its joys and hardships. And no terrorist attack will ever change that.

• Slumdog Millionaire opens on January 9