The Massie Twins recently got a chance to sit down and discuss Slumdog Millionaire with none other than Danny Boyle himself. But Danny got to interview us for a little bit beforehand.
Danny Boyle: So how old are you guys?
Massie Twins: We’re 24 now.
DB: So how’s it been growing up being twins?
MT: It’s interesting. (laughs) Being
identical we had certain advantages, and of course we did the things
identical twins are obligated to do, like switching classes.
DB: Brilliant! Are you guys empathetic?
MT: Sadly, no. It would be fun to let
on like we were.
Joel Massie, Danny Boyle, Mike Massie
DB: So do you guys work as a team when doing reviews?
MT: Yes, it’s our only bit of originality.
(laughs) So have you seen Slumdog Millionaire with an audience?
DB: I’ve done a lot of Q & A’s and
in Toronto I did get to watch it with an audience and that was really
interesting. You kind of have to stop after a while though because you’re
just too familiar with it. It’s a bit of a drug, especially when
it’s successful. It’s addictive when it works because it’s
a lovely feeling, but you have to stop because it’s seductive
and misleading. And you have to give it up and get on with something
else, which in my case is publicizing the film.
MT: So what’s your relationship
with your older films? Do you stop and watch them on TV?
DB: Yeah. You kind of get those odd moments where you
bump into it by accident. I was watching Sunshine – my daughter
was watching it with her friends at my house and I was in the kitchen
and I kind of watched it over their shoulders for about forty minutes.
And it was weird – I thought, “oh that’s quite good,
some of that.” (laughs)
MT: Slumdog was shot completely on location
in India. How’d you go about getting those locations?
DB: Yes, it was shot in Mumbai. You have to have a
local production company. There’s a lot of bureaucracy in India,
partly the fault of the British, partly the Soviets. It can take years
to get permission for something. So the film is on one track and they
run the permissions on a completely parallel universe, and yet somehow
you can shoot wherever you want – partly because it’s a
cash society of course – cash makes things happen. We’d
be there and there’d be court cases regularly in the papers for
things that happened in the 1980’s. So everybody knows that if
you want to get anything done you’ve got to obey the rules, but
in a parallel universe, not in this one.
MT: I read that there is an actual “Who
Wants to be a Millionaire” show in India. Did you get to use that
actual set or did you build your own?
DB: I went to see the show there. It’s huge there,
and they had the same set there exactly like it is here and in the U.K.
The production company said we can’t use that set and that it
would be cheaper for us to build you a completely new one – so
they built a completely new one. And I now know where that set is, because
next month in Afghanistan the show begins there, and I’ll bet
the guy who built it had in mind to get them to pay for it as well.
MT: How did they feel about the way the
show was portrayed in your film, especially because of the corruption
aspects?
DB: They were okay with it, because the guy who originally
came up with the show kept the rights to make a feature film about it.
So we didn’t have to pay royalties on anything – the music,
the look, the brand name. And it’s a brand name that will help
you anywhere in the world. Because when the film opens in Korea or Argentina,
they all have their own version of the show, so even if they don’t
want to watch a film about India, there’s that common ground you
can use in the publicity of the film.
MT: What was the casting process like
for this film?
DB: The film was initially written completely in English.
And when we first got there the seven-year-olds couldn’t really
speak English and the casting director said to me that if you really
want this to work, you’ll have to do the beginning in Hindi. Because
kids from the slums will not speak English at that age and we wanted
to use real slum kids. So I had this terrible conversation where I had
to ring Warner Bros. and tell them that now the film is going to be
in Hindi with English subtitles. The middle parts were tricky too because
they have the worst job of all. Everybody loves the kids at seven. Everybody
likes her (Freida Pinto) because she’s beautiful and everybody
likes him (Dev Patel) because he does it. It’s the middle kids
that appear about 40 minutes into the film where the first wave of delight
has passed and they have the toughest job of all because they have to
convince you that they were them (the seven-year-olds) and they are
going to be them (Patel and Pinto).
MT: On the IMDB message boards they say
you should direct the next James Bond movie. Any thoughts on that?
DB: (laughs) When I was a kid growing up that is what
I read. I’ve read all of them at least three times each because
the sex, danger, and glamour of it is everything you want, so I’m
very close to them. But the way they make them I couldn’t do it.
They make them like a machine – there’s units and they work
on different blocks of the film and then put them together at the end.
I’d want so much control over it and they wouldn’t be prepared
to give it, so that’s not going to happen really.
MT: So how do you choose your next project?
DB: It’s partly difference. Especially when you
do something like Sunshine which is very controlled, meticulous and
slow and it’s such a kind of narrow world in serious sci-fi, and
I did want the chance to do something in a chaotic city like Mumbai.
I didn’t quite realize how different it would be, but I was up
for that. And you do try and look for something different, but what
you really respond to is an idea that you have, or a book or script.
MT: We were kind of shocked to see the
film get an R Rating. Was there any pressure to get a PG-13?
DB: Well, it wasn’t pressure. We signed the contract
and it was a PG-13. When you sign a contract there’s two things
you have to stipulate: the runtime will be below a certain length and
the certificate. And they wanted a PG-13 and I agreed and signed it.
And I shot everything to get a PG-13. There’s nothing in it explicit.
So I did all the right things but they said the overall intensity of
the journey means it’s an R. And they said there’s no point
in appealing because it’s not about shaving minutes or little
images out of there. I was shocked at that and disappointed because
I thought I had done a good job to make it as intense as possible but
stay within the PG-13 realm.
MT: The story is so universal that it’s
really a shame to slap an R rating on it.
DB: Listen, if I was doing an R film, I would be at
the maximum. It would be borderline NC-17. (laughs)
- Gone With The Twins
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