Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little interview I got with Danny Boyle at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Now, I interviewed him before the film came out, when he came through Austin on the festival circuit. That was a much longer, more in-depth interview and can be read here, but what’s interesting about this is it acts as a kind of counter-point interview.

When we first talked SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was a relatively unknown picture that was just starting to build some buzz on the festival circuit after being dropped by its original studio. Now, Boyle, his cast and the picture have won the top Golden Globes and SAG Awards and have been nominated for a ton of Oscars.

I’m not lying to him when I start off by saying that SLUMDOG is my pick for Best Picture and I’m relatively certain it will take the statue. This isn’t an ass-kissing moment. I’m gunning for a chat with David Fincher later today and I really like BENJAMIN BUTTON, but if I should get the opportunity to chat with the man I will not tell him that he’s my pick for the Oscar.

So, here’s a quick chat about the mania of the Awards season and some very interesting technical information about the making of the movie. Enjoy!

Quint: When we last talked you were telling me then that you were on an amazing rush, because this was only something like four or five weeks after everything shut down and you thought the movie was just going to be lost and then it started hitting at film festivals and now… You are my pick for best picture dude. Honestly. I’m sure that everybody will come up and say that to you, but I’m not throwing that out there lightly. Maybe if WALL-E or DARK KNIGHT had made it up there I wouldn’t be saying this to you, but right now I really do think SLUMDOG is the best film nominated.

Danny Boyle: What’s incredible is that when you meet, because you meet people now like Roger (Durling, SBIFF head honcho), who were at Telluride and Toronto and you can think back right at the beginning of it, when it all started off… It has been extraordinary, what has happened since. It’s been a lot of work by a lot of people. You tend to take it for granted as it has happened, but actually while it’s happening, you work and work and work and the people at Fox Searchlight are brilliant.

Quint: They really seemed to unroll it very well. It is a grassroots success story.

Danny Boyle: Yes, patience… It was very small to begin with and then you let the word of mouth surround it and the internet...

Quint: And patience isn’t what Hollywood is known for, at all.

Danny Boyle: No, it’s very difficult to keep that patience, to keep steady and calm, because everything is kind of instant. That’s the whole thing of our times, isn’t it, it’s this instant thing…

Quint: Movies have one weekend. If it doesn’t open big, then it’s a failure…

Danny Boyle: Yeah, but they just kept going and that’s just brilliant.

Quint: That’s great. So, one thing that I hadn’t realized about the making of the movie was that you actually filmed with a digital camera for the running through the streets. Did you film 35mm for the rest of it?

Danny Boyle: No, about 75 percent of the film is shot on digital, on this new system called an SI-2K. It’s from Los Angeles and it’s called a Silicone Imaging 2K and it’s the same as the Red camera, but it isn’t manufactured yet, so it’s not in a body in the way the Red is.

So that was hugely to our benefit, because although there were teething problems with it, its flexibility was incredible. I think once it’s manufactured, it won’t be as flexible, but for ours, because it was a prototype, it was incredible. It was incredible and like I said (during the Q&A for the movie), it was just a notebook on the guy’s back, with dry ice to keep it cool, because that’s one of the problems. Because it’s not manufactured yet, there’s no cooling system or fans, so we did it with dry ice to keep it cool.

You can put any lens on it you want. You can put a huge lens on and put it on a crane. You can put a small lens and keep it in his hand and he can run. Unlike handheld film canisters, he can separate it from the body.

Quint: So, that’s how you got all of the liquid motion?

Danny Boyle: That’s how you get that kind of feel on it.

Quint: Did you have to have a big DI (Digital Intermediate) process, then?

Danny Boyle: Yes. You have to save money for that. When you work on digital, everybody knows that’s the only thing you’ve got to do. It’s relatively cheap to work on itself, but you’ve got to keep money back for the DI and the processing costs and all of that kind of stuff and we did do that, but you can see… I know people have been saying it for a long time and we shot 28 DAYS LATER on a much lower system, on mini-DV, but you can feel it coming…. It’s coming…

Quint: That’s insane. I’ve seen a lot of Red’s stuff before and there’s still something about it that feels plasticy, but there’s nothing about your movie that feels at all like that, which is why I was shocked to hear you shot digital.

Danny Boyle: That’s the cameraman. Even with a nice camera, you still need a great cameraman. There is still some wonderful stuff you can do with it. It’s brilliant, I think and it also helps actors, because it doesn’t have the same classical myth as film and you can run it, just run it and run it and (if it doesn’t work) erase it, but if you want kids especially to feel like “Hey, it’s just party time…”

Quint: No pressure…

Danny Boyle: There’s no turnover now or anything like that. You can just run it. Also in the slums… people there are devoted to film and if they see a proper film camera, they think there will be a Bollywood star along and for the next five days (they’re like) “we will wait here until he gets here,” but they see these little cameras, they think “Oh it’s a documentary or something…”

Quint: Yeah.

Danny Boyle: “It’s just annoying” and they ignore you and that’s a big advantage as well there. That was a big advantage for us as well, which again was luck. I wasn’t planning it as such, it was just luck and fortune that played into our hands and it’s a wonderful way of capturing the place, because it’s about dynamism rather than absolute quality control.

Quint: Completely. I love how you were saying that that was the inspiration for photographing the slums, the energy of the area. I have been reading all of these things about poverty porn in and it’s like “Really? Guys, did you see the movie?”

Danny Boyle: You will always get that and I didn’t explain it well, but the thing you get there is the law of the universe, you know that law of the universe? “To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” you get that in India millions of times over, these forces go back and forth. What you have to do is not fight it, you just kind of go and absorb them and especially you are, as a film maker, you are really privileged anyways to be a filmmaker and you have to also accept the blows as well, sometimes when they come.

So I’ll stand and defend the film against anybody, except I wont defend it in a defensive way at all, because we behaved really well in the way that we made it and we made it in the right spirit and I think the spirit of it comes across in the film, I think. It’s one of the things that helps make the film convincing to people, I think there’s a spirit in it that is genuine and that comes across somehow in there.

Quint: So, what are you going to do Oscar day? What are your plans?

Danny Boyle: I’ll tell you one of the most amazing… The Golden Globes. I’m on English time and I was awake at 5am, like you are and I turned on the television and it was the football from home, Manchester United, who are from my hometown. We beat Chelsea 3-nil in the morning and then in the evening we got four Golden Globes, so it was like a knockout day, which there will never be a day like that again.

We are trying at the moment to get all of the kids to come, because we have tried to protect the kids from exposure to it, the younger sets of kids, there are six of them al together, and they are desperate to come, because they read about all of the stuff here and they are desperate to come here. We are trying to protect them from it and look after their best interest, but we just agreed, actually, that we are going to try to get them here for it if we can, because it’s very complicated.

Quint: It’s everybody’s victory, too, if it happens.

Danny Boyle: What was wonderful last night with the SAG is, you know what they do at SAG? Gold statues, they give one to every actor who is in the film in a major role, so for our film they got eleven or twelve statues, so each of the kids will get statues.

Quint: Oh really?

Danny Boyle: They will each get one of them, which I am really pleased with.

Quint: That’s really nice.

Danny Boyle: That’s really cool. We took the Globes to India, so that they could see the Globes. We took all four so that the kids could see them as well, so that was really cool.

Quint: I will definitely be watching. As I said, I think it’s going to be your night. I don’t want to jinx you, but I do think it’s going to be your night.

Danny Boyle: You know the guy in the film… well you know the guy obviously, you know Benjamin Franklin, he said “Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes.” That’s what it is whenever anybody says that and of course we can quote him, because he is in the movie as well.

Quint: Fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with me again. I really appreciate it.

Like I said, a quick chat, but hopefully an enjoyable one. Be back soon with more coverage that includes Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz, Clint Eastwood and a few more reviews!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com