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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Danny Boyle, from a standing start

dannyboylezughofslumdog.jpgWHAT CAN A DIRECTOR TELL YOU IN THREE MINUTES, 38 SECONDS? In the case of Danny Boyle, quite a bit. This interview began with both of us on our feet at a headlong rush, sitting only a few minutes into our conversation. [The other 41 minutes of this Q&A will be on MCN after Thanksgiving.]
The last time I talked to Boyle on his press tour for Sunshine, I’d only just read about the Slumdog project the night before, and it was only weeks before he began shooting. The idea of his working from a Beaufoy script with digital cameras hurtling through the back-alleys of Mumbai sounded propulsive with potential, and I’d told him so. “It’s funny, innit?” he says in his rapid Scots burr, laughing on the morning of his 52nd birthday. “I’d love to replay that now, if I could see myself talking about it. ‘Cos it’s weird, you go off and make these things. You’ve talked about them before. Luckily, this weird amnesia sets in about things. You do all these interviews and it does make you very self-conscious about stuff, about why you’re doing stuff, in a way that you never think about normally. And yet clearly, you forget it. Because when you come to make a film? I never think about what I’ve said to anybody about it. Some amnesiac drug sets in whereby you forget the self-consciousness and you go off on this trip of making a film.”
We still haven’t sat down. “Often when I talk to journalists, I sound coherent! You don’t think in that coherent way when you’re doing things; you make sense of them afterwards, don’t you? Patterns emerge about what sounds interesting and attractive. Some of it’s true and some of it is a bit of a fabrication, but basically you work out this way of talking about it, but it isn’t necessarily the way you’ve made the film at all. But fortunately the two are separate in a way. They don’t… My biggest worry, I’ve just been in Austin, where they gave me this award. I’m terrified of things like that, people start talking—”
Is it over, is that what youre thinking? “The start talking about the ooov-rah, y’know, about the connective tissue of the films.” Boyle cuts a huge grin. “Fuck! It’s like… ahhhh! But fortunately, it all seems to kind of blur away. You have amnesia when you read a script as well. People have been asking about ht script and my line on it, which is true, after about ten or fifteen pages, I knew I was going to make it, even though the prospect of reading it hadn’t been particularly attractive. I’ve been saying, the best way to make the decisions is in the middle not by the time you get to the end. It’s because you have amnesia when you’re reading a script, of actually what problems you’re going to ace making it. You forget the realities of filmmaking, money and stars and studios and distribution and locations.” He lets out his boisterous laugh. “You just forget all that, you just think, ‘Awww, this is fantastic! Wouldn’t this be great?’ And then you get on with it. That’s the amnesia thing that helps you. It’s like they say about women having children. They say hormones are released in women that makes them forget the pain. Otherwise women would only ever have one child! Otherwise no one would be insane enough to go back to that level of suffering!”
Now we sit on adjoining couches. He remembers I’d asked about the shooting. “Gather round, gather round. So we’re in the slums. We get a couple of little shacks to have the equipment in and it’s full, these rooms would be full of dry ice. This weird image! The hard drive, the Apple notebook that’s on the cameraman’s back was a MacBook Pro. It’s in a suitcase surrounded with dry ice to keep it cool. Not just because of the temperature of India, which, y’know, adds to it. But because they overheat. That’s one of the biggest technical problems we had with it. So you’d have this weird image full of dry ice, like some kind of rock concert! All these assistants handling dry ice with these gloves or with tweezers. We’d have three or four of these cameras, and they’d be resupplying them with dry ice. So that’s high-definition filming in the streets of Mumbai!” [To be continued.]

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And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon