Jim is the everyman, a bicycle messenger whose nearly fatal traffic accident probably saves his life. Spend enough money on this story, and it would have the depth of " Armageddon." Alex Garland's screenplay develops characters who seem to have a reality apart from their role in the plot-whose personalities help decide what they do, and why. The audience wouldn't stand for everybody being dead at the end, even though that's the story's logical outcome.ĭirector Danny Boyle ("Train-spotting") shoots on video to give his film an immediate, documentary feel, and also no doubt to make it affordable a more expensive film would have had more standard action heroes, and less time to develop the quirky characters. I suppose movies like this have to end with the good and evil characters in a final struggle. The ending is disappointing-an action shoot-out, with characters chasing one another through the headquarters of a rogue Army unit-but for most of the way, it's a great ride. I wasn't lying when I said to Warner's it will be even more exciting with subtitles.So opens "28 Days Later," which begins as a great science fiction film and continues as an intriguing study of human nature. "It was lovely to introduce color," he said.
In one scene set in an outhouse, green and amber-backed subtitles bring jewel tones to an otherwise brown-toned shot.
To ensure that "Slumdog's" subtitles stayed legible against all backgrounds, Boyle (and London-based title designer Matthew Curtis, who says the project was "a joy to do") attached the text to bright banners of color. The subtitles turned red, dripped like blood, vaporized and jumped across the screen. "But you don't watch the film - you read the film and you scan occasionally to the actors."īoyle had seen nontraditional subtitles before in the 2004 Russian sci-fi film "Night Watch," by Timur Bekmambetov. "It's so cheap to do laser printing at the bottom of the screen," he said. To make good on his word, he came up with the idea to have the subtitles look more like the dialogue in comic books, which float depending on where the characters are positioned.
(Warner Independent Pictures has since gone out of business Fox Searchlight Pictures is distributing the film.) He assured the Hollywood executives that he hadn't lost his mind, and he made them a promise: that the film would be even more exciting because of the subtitles. You could tell they thought I'd gone upriver and was going to come back with a movie about yoga or something." "I rang up Warner Independent and said, 'Yeah, the first third is going to be in Hindi!' " Boyle recalled in an interview two weeks ago at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown. When Boyle gave them permission to act in Hindi, "it came alive." The film was supposed to be all in English until British director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "28 Days Later") got to Mumbai and realized that the youngest Jamal, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, could act only in Hindi in English, Khedekar and the other young actors were stiff.
Three actors play Jamal at different ages. As he moves through the trivia questions, we see his life in flashbacks - from the murder of his mother to conning tourists at the Taj Mahal to falling in love. The film is about an 18-year-old orphan in Mumbai named Jamal who goes on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" for a shot at 20 million rupees. The first third of "Slumdog Millionaire," which opened Wednesday, is in Hindi with subtitles.
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