--- title: 10 Questions for Danny Boyle | TIME description: 'Slumdog Millionaire' won eight Academy Awards, including a statue for its director Danny Boyle. He answers reader questions here canonical: https://time.com/video/SXurE7Mp/ og:title: 10 Questions for Danny Boyle og:description: 'Slumdog Millionaire' won eight Academy Awards, including a statue for its director Danny Boyle. He answers reader questions here og:url: https://time.com/video/SXurE7Mp/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/SXurE7Mp/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Questions for Danny Boyle twitter:description: 'Slumdog Millionaire' won eight Academy Awards, including a statue for its director Danny Boyle. He answers reader questions here twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/SXurE7Mp/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 10 Questions for Danny Boyle > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions for Danny Boyle [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions for Danny Boyle](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/SXurE7Mp.m3u8) (5:39)  _Published 2009-02-20. 'Slumdog Millionaire' won eight Academy Awards, including a statue for its director Danny Boyle. He answers reader questions here_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:06 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Behind the Scenes With Danny Meyer](/video/XpYPyvuJ/) ### Behind the Scenes With Danny Meyer [Susan Boyle and Me](/video/xWOrp0bv/) ### Susan Boyle and Me [Slumdog Millionaire Opens in India](/video/u8LhTxMD/) ### _Slumdog Millionaire_ Opens in India --- ## Transcript >> Hi. I'm Alison Stateman and this is 10 Questions for Time. I'm here with Danny Boyle who's most recent film, Slumdog Millionaire, has garnered massive acclaim for the director and his cast. Thank you for being here. >> Very nice to be here. >> Ryan McLawen in Detroit, Michigan wants to know you seem to gravitate towards projects that redefine our expectations of what a genre movie can be with 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Slumdog. What's the key to shaking things up as a film maker? >> As a good way of putting it actually because I try to, I have this kind of-- it's a more provocative than a coherent theory but the-- your first film is always your best film in some way. It might your most successful is certainly not your most technically accomplished or anything like that but there's something about doing your first one when you don't know what you're doing quite, and you can always try to get back to that moment of when you don't know what you're doing which is shaking things up a bit because you're not relying on things you've done before, either successes or techniques or anything like that, and you're trying to approach each one fresh, you know, and literally start from the bottom and learn everything while you're making the film. On this film I've never been to Mumbai before, so you're learning everything as you go along. You're gonna have to learn a bit Bollywood, a bit Mumbai but, you know, all the history, and all the politics and all the culture and everything like that. It's extraordinary. >> What surprised you most about Mumbai or working there on this film? >> It's an extraordinary city; they call it the Maximum City. The only place I've ever been similar to it is New York, the first time I went to New York-- the first time you go to New York-- the first time I went there was in the early '80s and it's just extraordinary. The cities, they just grab you by the throat and say, " You'll never be the same again, welcome ." In Mumbai, and this seems to me to unique from my experience anyway, everything is side by side, you know, the poor [ unk ] in the ghetto, the slums are very much mixed in with the whole city, and when you fly over the city you see that strikingly, everything is next door to each door, and they kind of keep-- that feeling is there in the city the whole time, these incredible mood swings in the day, you see some terrible things and then you see the most joyous thing and they all bang in to each other like that. So, the tone of our film tries to reflect that. >> Are there any movies that fans of cult classics like Train Spotting or film festival favorites like Slumdog Millionaire would be surprised to find out that you enjoy? Do you have any guilty pleasures? >> God, well my guilty pleasure this year was Tropic Thunder, which I thought was hilarious, I mean and brilliant. It's got quite interesting to say in it, you know, about acting and about entertainment and all that kind of stuff, but it's hilariously done and beautifully done, brilliantly acted by a lot of them. So, that's a big guilty pleasure this year that I've had, and I'm a huge fan of those kind of ridiculous comedies and also action movies, I love big action movies. >> What is your response to the claims that you're romanticizing the poverty in India? >> It's very interesting that question because I think film does that anyway, almost by its nature film, kind of seems to sometimes glamorize stuff and I try to make very exciting films always so there's a double danger that you do that with it. When we went, you know, we went into the slums of India; I had a very different image of them than is the truth. People said to us, people that we worked within the slums said, " You're not gonna show us to be poor, are you ?" Because that's what Westerners always do, and you go, " Well if you show it like this it's gonna look poor ," but I try to make the film with that kind of energy where there were [ unk ] that the place is alive, that it has it's kind of vitality despite its poverty really in a way. The spirit of the film on the idea that his only dog who comes from there is able to succeed against all the odds is something that I feel comes directly from the city, and if that means that some people regard it as romanticizing poverty I wouldn't apologize for that really, I'd still-- I'm very proud of the film. It's a very romantic idea which probably doesn't happen very often in real life but it's something that we want to believe in, in the movies I think, and I do believe in it very much and that's why I made the film. >> You said working in the slums and with children from the slums affect you emotionally? >> They do affect you enormously. There's something-- they're all magic on screen because they don't bring any baggage; the soul simple and straightforward, once it's explained to them what it seems about, once they understand the way to play it, there's such directness over what they do. They're not bothered about what they look like, what-- does this make my character-- is this gonna make my character more popular or less popular, you know, all that kind of baggage stuff, they're not really bothered about all of that, they just play the scene. So, it's always very moving and I think it's that you just see yourself in them, you know, you just think that's where we come from and we've got very, very complicated. In all the years it has taken me from where they are now to here you just complicated everything, you know, and if you could have lived in the simple way that they see things, it's something beautiful about that. Words would have this wonderful thing where you imagines when you're born, you've come out of the sea and you walk up the shore, and as you learn language and sophistication you lose sight of what you've come from, you know, it's very true in a way, you know, because all the things, all the attributes we gather around those make us lose sight of that simplicity really in a way. I think that's what you connect with really. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"10 Questions for Danny Boyle","description":"'Slumdog Millionaire' won eight Academy Awards, including a statue for its director Danny Boyle. 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