Boyle, 52, is receiving some of the best reviews of his career for this study of an impoverished boy from the Mumbai slums who becomes a contestant on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and finds himself on the verge of winning the big multi-million-rupee prize. Based on a book called Q And A, the film shows how young Jamal Malik (played as a young adult by Dev Patel) relates to the show’s questions through the often harrowing things he’s experienced in his own life and the lives of those around him, including his gangster brother and Latika (gorgeous newcomer Freida Pinto), the girl he grew up with and is in love with.

Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale with dark and disturbing moments that paints a vivid picture of Indian culture and the colorful, unpredictable streets of Mumbai. One of Boyle’s goals was to capture the rhythm of the city and all its denizens, from the very rich to the very poor, from the beggars and the prostitutes to the gangsters and a wealthy, powerful and conniving game show host (played by Bollywood star Anil Kapoor). By all accounts, Boyle achieved his goal. The film percolates and delivers thrills, shudders, romance, laughter, wonderment and joy from its audience.

“Everyone knows that there’s incredible poverty and incredible wealth (in Mumbai),” says Boyle, rapidly, of his experience in the city while in a comfy Philadelphia hotel room to discuss the film. “What you don’t realize is that the way that everything is side by side, completely inclusive by choice and non-choice. And you have to get your head around that to understand it. The emulsions are extreme. There are huge rows (fights) all around where people are kicking the --- out of each other. And you wonder what’s going to happen now. Then the next minute everything is fine again. It’s OK and there’s no grudge.

“Everything is these kinds of extremes, and the thing I found very moving is that everything is inclusive. You hear stuff about the caste system and destiny and fate used to keep people in their place, and it’s actually not like that. The destiny thing is inclusive. Everyone is included, even though your fate may be apparently to be poor, you are linked to (Anil) Kapoor, who is a big Bollywood star. You are absolutely linked with him, and there is no separation at all.

“Like a Hollywood star getting their friends to donate to charity. And getting their friends to ring in and donate money. It’s not like that. It’s absolutely like they feel completely bound together. When they build new luxurious high-rises, they don’t clear away the slums like they would do here or in Britain, and build lawns and lakes. The slum stays-there’s no instinct to clear away the slum. They stay there, though. They may get a job in the building.”

“The poverty exists, but the one thing they don’t want you doing is to compare it to the poverty in Africa. Nobody starves in India. There’s a sense of community that prevents that. You have to embrace all the contradictions of India to get the benefit of it. It’s difficult to explain.”

In order to capture Mumbai, Boyle shot much of the movie with digital camera, which allowed him to get around the city more easily and capture its vitality, often surreptitiously. He also used the cameras to film an elaborate chase sequence through the city’s bustling streets.

“I love a chase scene!,” admits Boyle, adjusting his glasses. “We got these digital cameras, because I realized very quickly that we weren’t going to shoot it on film. The film cameras are quite cumbersome. Cameras come with a whole culture. There’s no insurance on equipment in India of any kind. So, you might have a $50,000 camera and you can’t insure it against damage. So what there is, are three boys that arrive with the camera, and they live with the camera. They sleep with it. That is their role. I thought if we got small cameras we could be more flexible. People saw cameras and didn’t know what we were doing. If they saw a movie camera, they’d try to get themselves on film.”

Boyle said the streets of Mumbai are anything but passive, “except for the tourists and gangsters,” who, as depicted in the film, will go to great lengths to get money from the tourists. “The slums are filled with people working, everyone is moving and there are these cottage industries working. They don’t want to move these slums. They want the land because its very valuable.

“We tried to include as much of the city as we could. You don’t go there with a message, and we’re not trying to be evangelical. You can’t teach them anything about poverty. We tried to do that in narrative of making a kid in a game show and make it as vivid as possible. We move from the blinding of a kid to a dance. If you didn’t have these things, you wouldn’t have a true portrait of the city.”

Just as the film’s lead character Jamal learns of his run on the TV quiz show, Boyle believes the film’s success is part of his destiny. Following the financial disappointment of his 2007 $50 million sci-fi effort Sunshine, Boyle went the relatively low-budget route for Millionaire, bringing it in for $13 million. Like Jamal, too, the film faced many crises before it got to theaters. First, Boyle had to convince his backers and distribution companies—Warner Brothers in the U.S.—that making a film that’s partly in Hindi with subtitles is OK. Boyle said they were “absolutely appalled” at the notion. He claims that his name “just” guaranteed him creative control on a project of this size. Then Warner’s independent division folded, leaving him without an American distributor, facing a straight-to-DVD trajectory.

Boyle’s reaction when he heard that Warner was abandoning the film’s theatrical run?

“Your normal attitude would be homicidal rage,” says Boyle, who would love to add another genre to his credits—say, a musical—one day. “You just want to kill someone, ideally someone at Warner Brothers,” he recalls, laughing. But he said he gained strength from his adventure in India. “In fact, I had learned from being in India. I’d become much more able to deal with extremes. I knew that about myself. I thought, well, at least it would work in the UK. The experience of India did change me. Because you’ve done that, like they say in India, good will become of it.”

“Sure enough, (the film festivals at) Telluride and Toronto started shaking about the film and demanded to see it,” relates Boyle.

Warner became aware of the buzz, and allowed Fox Searchlight (under the auspices of head Peter Rice) to take over distribution chores. Boyle says that the company is the best at releasing this sort of film, while remaining dismissive of their marketing of Sunshine.

The whole Slumdog Millionaire shoot and its preceding experiences have had a huge impact on Boyle, making him downright philosophical. “The film feels fated, and that there’s a destiny (to it) that’s outside of your control,” the director muses. “But that’s the point of being a director in India and you have to learn to accept it and abandon all control. Most of the time as a filmmaker, it’s all about control.

“Sunshine was about incredible, minute, precise control. But filming in Mumbai is different: you can’t repeat things, everything changes all the time. Continuity is a joke, forget it. There is no continuity, it’s all up for grabs every minute of the day.

“As Jack Nicholson says, ‘We’re all dying. Act accordingly.’”

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