Slumdog Millionaire - Trailer
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=AIzbwV7on6Q
Slumdog Millionaire Soundtrack - Jai Ho
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=DciW_yuQGCw
Slumdog Millionaire
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Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny BoyleLoveleen Tandan (co-director)
Produced by Christian Colson
Written by Simon BeaufoyVikas Swarup (novel)
Starring Dev PatelFreida PintoAnil KapoorIrrfan KhanTanay ChhedaSaurabh ShuklaMahesh Manjrekar
Music by A. R. Rahman
Cinematography Anthony Dod Mantle
Editing by Chris Dickens
Distributed by Fox Searchlight PicturesWarner Bros. (US)Pathé (Intl.)
Release date(s) 12 November 2008 (US, limited)26 December 2008 (US, wide)9 January 2009 (UK)23 January 2009 (India)
Running time 120 min.
Country United Kingdom
Language EnglishHindi
Budget $15 million
Gross revenue $72,809,456 [1]
Official website • IMDb • Allmovie
Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle, co-directed by Loveleen Tandan, and written by Simon Beaufoy. It is an adaptation of the Boeke Prize winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize nominated novel Q and A by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup. Tandan, who began as the film’s casting director, was later appointed the co-director by Boyle because of her significant contributions to the film’s production.[2]
Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a young, uneducated man from the Dharavi slums of Mumbai who appears on Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) and exceeds people’s expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.
After screenings at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire initially had a limited North American release on 12 November 2008 to critical acclaim and awards success, and later had a nationwide release in the United States on 26 December 2008 and in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2009. It premiered in Mumbai on 22 January 2009.[3]
Slumdog Millionaire won five of the six awards it was nominated for at the Critics’ Choice Awards and all four of the awards it was nominated for at the Golden Globes. It has also been nominated for eleven BAFTA Awards and ten Academy Awards.
Plot
Slumdog Millionaire opens with a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) in Mumbai, India, interrogating and torturing Jamal Malik (Dev Patel, also played by Tanay Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar), a former street child from the Dharavi slums. Jamal is a contestant on the game show, Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), hosted by Prem Kumar (noted Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor). Jamal has made it to the final question, but the police are now accusing him of cheating.
Jamal then begins to offer an explanation of how he knew the answers which is conveyed as a series of flashbacks documenting the particulars of his childhood. This includes scenes of him obtaining the autograph of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan; the death of his mother during Hindu-Muslim riots in the slums; and how he and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, and Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala) befriended the orphan girl, Latika (Freida Pinto, Rubiana Ali, and Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar). As Jamal’s favorite book from his short period in school was The Three Musketeers, he refers to Salim and himself as Athos and Porthos, and Latika as the third Musketeer.
The children are eventually discovered by Maman (Ankur Vikal) while they live in the trash heaps. Maman is a gangster (a fact they do not actually know at the time they meet him) who "collects" street children so that he can ultimately train them to beg for money. Salim is groomed to become a part of Maman’s operation and is asked to bring Jamal to Maman in order to be blinded (which would improve his income potential as a singing beggar). Salim rebels against Maman to protect his brother, and the three children try to escape, but only Salim and Jamal are successful. Latika is re-captured by Maman’s organization and raised as a culturally talented prostitute whose virginity will fetch a high price.
The brothers eke out a living, traveling on top of trains, selling goods, pretending to be tour guides at the Taj Mahal, and pickpocketing. Jamal eventually insists that they return to Mumbai since he wishes to locate Latika. When he finds her working as a dancer in a brothel, the brothers attempt to rescue her, but Maman intrudes, and in the resulting conflict Salim draws a gun and kills Maman. Salim then uses the fact that he killed Maman to obtain a job with Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar), a rival crime lord. Salim claims Latika as his own and when Jamal protests, Salim threatens to kill him and Latika intervenes, accepting her fate with Salim and breaking Jamal’s heart.
Years later, Jamal has a position as a "chai-wallah", (a boy or young man who serves tea) at a call centre. When he is asked to cover for a co-worker for a couple of minutes, he searches the database for Salim and Latika. He gets in touch with Salim, who has become a high-ranking lieutenant in Javed’s organization. Salim invites Jamal to live with him and, after following Salim to Javed’s house, he sees Latika living there. He talks his way in as the new dishwasher and tries to convince Latika to leave. She rebuffs his advances, but he promises to be at the VT (Victoria Terminal, or Chhatrapati Shivaji) railway station every day at 5pm. One day Latika attempts to rendezvous with him, but is recaptured by Salim and Javed’s men, one of whom slashes her cheek with a knife, scarring her.
Jamal again loses contact with Latika when Javed moves to another home. In another attempt to find Latika, Jamal tries out for the game show because he knows that she will be watching. He makes it to the final question, despite the hostile attitude of the host who feeds Jamal an incorrect answer during a break. At the end of the episode’s taping, Jamal has one question left to win 20 million, or two crore, rupees and is taken into police custody, where he is tortured as the police attempt to learn how Jamal, a simple slumdog, could know the answers to so many questions. After Jamal tells his whole story, explaining how his life experiences coincidentally enabled him to know the answer to each question, the police inspector calls his explanation "bizarrely plausible" and allows Jamal to return to the show for the final question. At Javed’s safehouse, Latika watches the news coverage of Jamal’s miraculous run on the show. Salim gives Latika the keys to his car and his phone and urges her to run away. When Jamal uses his Phone-A-Friend lifeline to call Salim, Latika answers his phone and they reconnect. She does not know the answer to the final question either, but believing that "it is written", Jamal guesses the correct answer (Aramis) to the question of the one Musketeer whose name they never learned, and wins the grand prize. Simultaneously, Salim is discovered to have helped Latika escape and allows himself to be killed in a bathtub full of money after shooting and killing Javed. Salim’s last words are "God is great", which is a Muslim prayer. Later that night, Jamal and Latika meet at the train station, and finally share a kiss. The closing credits then imitate a Bollywood-style musical number.
[edit] Production
Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy wrote Slumdog Millionaire based on the Boeke Prize winning novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup.[4] To hone the script, Beaufoy made three research trips to India and interviewed street children, finding himself impressed with their attitudes. Swarup used many ideas from student director Asim Bhatti while working on the script. The screenwriter said of his goal for the script: "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." By the summer of 2006, British production companies Celador Films and Film4 invited director Danny Boyle to read the script Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle initially hesitated since he was not interested in making a film about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?[5] Boyle soon found out that the screenwriter was Beaufoy, who had written The Full Monty (1997), one of the director’s favorite British films, and decided to revisit the script.[6] Boyle was impressed by how Beaufoy wove the multiple storylines from Swarup’s book into one narrative, and the director decided to commit to the project. The film was projected to cost US$15 million, so Celador sought a distributor to share costs. Fox Searchlight Pictures made an initial offer that was reportedly in the $2 million range, and Warner Independent Pictures made a $5 million offer that Fox Searchlight could not top.[5]
Filmmakers travelled to Mumbai in September 2007 with a partial crew and began hiring local cast and crew for production in Karjat. Originally beginning as the casting director, Loveleen Tandan, has stated that she "suggested to Danny and Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog, that it was important to do some of it in Hindi to bring the film alive [...] They asked me to pen the Hindi dialogues which I, of course, instantly agreed to do. And as we drew closer to the shoot date, Danny asked me to step in as the co-director." [7] Boyle then decided to translate nearly a third of the film’s English dialogue into Hindi. The director fibbed to Warner Independent’s president that he wanted 10% of the dialogue in Hindi, and she approved of the change. Filming locations included shooting in Mumbai’s megaslum and in shantytown parts of Juhu, so filmmakers controlled the crowds by befriending onlookers.[5] Filming began on 5 November 2007.[8]
In addition to Swarup’s original novel Q and A, the film was also directly inspired by Bollywood films.[9][10] Tandan has stated that Slumdog Millionaire is a homage to Hindi commercial cinema, noting that "The writer Simon Beaufoy studied Salim-Javed’s kind of cinema minutely."[9] Boyle has cited the influence of the following Bollywood films set in Mumbai: Deewaar (1975) by Yash Chopra, Satya (1998) and Company (2002) by Ram Gopal Verma, and Black Friday (2004) by Anurag Kashyap. Satya and Company (the latter based on the D-Company) both offered "slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld" and displayed a lot of "brutality and urban violence." The screenplay for Satya was also co-written by Saurabh Shukla, who portrays Constable Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle has stated that the chase in one of the opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire was based on a "12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum" in Black Friday (itself adapted from S. Hussein Zaidi’s book of the same name about the 1993 Bombay bombings).[10][11] Deewaar, which Boyle described as being "absolutely key to Indian cinema," is a crime film pitting "a policeman against his brother, a gang leader based on real-life smuggler Haji Mastan," portrayed by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, whose autograph Jamal sought at the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire (Bachchan was also the original host for Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?).[10] The rags to riches underdog theme underlying the film was also a recurring theme in classic Bollywood movies from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when "India worked to lift itself from hunger and poverty."[12]
Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, the current host for Kaun Banega Crorepati, was initially offered the role of the show’s host in the film, but he eventually turned it down (the role was ultimately played by another Bollywood star Anil Kapoor). Khan later introduced Slumdog Millionaire during the 66th Golden Globe Awards, where he was presented as the "King of Bollywood".[13][14][15] Paul Smith, the executive producer of Slumdog Millionaire and the chairman of Celador Films, was the original creator of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?[16]
[edit] Cast
· · Dev Patel as Jamal Malik, the protagonist, a Muslim boy born and raised in the poverty of Mumbai.· [17] Boyle considered hundreds of young male actors, although he found that · Bollywood leads were generally "strong, handsome hero-types", not the personality he was looking for. Boyle’s 17-year-old daughter pointed him to the · British television ensemble drama · Skins, of which Patel was a cast member.· [5] The actor was cast in August 2007.· [8]
· Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as Youngest Jamal
· · Tanay Chheda as Middle Jamal
· · Freida Pinto as Latika, the girl with whom Jamal is in love. Pinto was an Indian model who had not starred in a feature film before.· [5] Regarding the "one of a kind" scarf she wears, "designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb" says, "I wanted to bookend the journey—to tie her childhood yellow dress to her final look."· [18]
· Rubiana Ali as Youngest Latika
· Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar as Middle Latika
· Madhur Mittal as Salim, Jamal’s elder brother.
· Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail as Youngest Salim
· Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala as Middle Salim
· · Anil Kapoor as Prem Kumar, the game show host.· [19]
· · Irrfan Khan as the Police Inspector
· · Saurabh Shukla as Constable Srinivas
· · Mahesh Manjrekar as Javed / Raja
· Ankur Vikal as Maman
· · Raj Zutshi as Millionare show producer
· Shah Rukh Munshi as a Slum kid · [12]
[edit] Release
In August 2007 Warner Independent Pictures acquired the American and Pathé the international rights to distribute Slumdog Millionaire theatrically.[8] Though Warner Independent Pictures paid $5 million to acquire rights to the film, the studio was hesitant about its commercial prospects. In May 2008, Warner Independent Pictures shut down, initially suggesting that Slumdog Millionaire would go straight to DVD.[20] In August 2008, the studio began searching for a buyer to relieve its overload of films at the time.[21] Halfway through the month, Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures entered a pact to share distribution of the film with Fox Searchlight buying in a 50% stake.[22] Slumdog Millionaire was first shown at the Telluride Film Festival on 30 August 2008, where it was positively received by audiences, generating "strong buzz".[23] The film also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2008, where it was "the first widely acknowledged popular success" of the festival,[24] winning the People’s Choice Award.[25]
Slumdog Millionaire debuted with an "impressive" limited North American release on 12 November 2008, grossing $350,434 in 10 theatres, a "strong" average of $35,043 per theatre.[26] In its second weekend, it expanded to 32 theatres and made $947,795, or an average of $29,619 per theatre, representing a drop of only 16%.[27] In the 10 original theatres that it was released in, viewership went up 16%, and this is attributed to strong word-of-mouth.[28] As of 23 January 2009, the film has grossed $44,711,799 at the US box office.[1]
The film opened at #1 at the UK box office.[29] The film set a UK box office record in the second week, when the film’s takings increased by 47%. This is the "biggest ever increase for a UK saturation release," breaking "the record previously held by Billy Elliot’s 13%." This record-breaking "ticket surge" in the second week came after Slumdog Millionaire won four Golden Globes and received eleven BAFTA nominations. The film has grossed £6.1 million in its first eleven days of release in the UK.[30]
The Indian premiere of Slumdog Millionaire took place in Mumbai on 22 January 2009 and was attended by major personalities of the Indian film industry. More than a hundred Indian film personalities attended this event. [31] A dubbed Hindi version, Slumdog Crorepati (8 M 2 ! K M 0 K ! < * $ ? ), was also released in India in addition to the original version of the film, Slumdog Millionaire.[32] Originally titled, Slumdog Millionaire: Kaun Banega Crorepati, the name was shortened for copyright purposes. Loveleen Tandan, who supervised the dubbing, stated: "All the actors from the original English including Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan and Ankur Vikal dubbed the film. We got a boy from Chembur Pradeep Motwani to dub for the male lead Dev Patel. I didn’t want any exaggerated dubbing. I wanted a young unspoilt voice."
