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Slumdog Millionaire
Would you have spotted the genius of Simon Beaufoy's Slumdog Millionaire at script stage?
Thu, 14 May 2009
A movie of the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?….? Puzzlement and a little intrigue are the responses on first hearing the outline of the film we now know as Slumdog Millionaire. As our reviewer Trevor Johnston finds, the film which has scooped screenwriter Simon Beaufoy the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar, is a masterclass in flashback.
“This is screenwriting as architecture”
(Director Danny Boyle on Simon Beaufoy’s script)
Slumdog Millionaire is about a Mumbai street kid who becomes a surprise success on the lucrative TV gameshow – so much so that the police investigate him. How could some uneducated oik know the answers to all those questions? Perhaps, if we know more about his colourful life, then his secrets may be revealed…
Such is the basis of Vikas Swarup’s acclaimed novel ‘Q&A’, in which the questions posed to humble contestant Jamal are answered in a series of flashbacks whereby he picks up nuggets of information on his picaresque adventures in modern India. Given the worldwide popularity of the TV format, it’s not hard to see how a movie adaptation might get off the ground (especially since the game’s originators Celador are also in film production), but the problems of shaping such a story into celluloid-friendly are manifold. The novel’s question and answer conceit may well be too rigid for the screen, for instance, since audiences might feel that the story’s too cut-and-dried, thus sucking tension out of the narrative. Indeed, if it’s just a question of ticking off the boxes towards bigger prize money, then viewers might as well stay in front of their TVs at home. What the film would need to stand on its own is a more creative structure allowing tension to build and character to develop, plus an underlying sense that it’s all about more than landing the cash – enticing though that undoubtedly may be if you’ve never had two rupees to rub together.
Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, he of The Full Monty fame, rises adeptly to the challenge with a triple-pronged attack which grabs us right from the start and never lets go. What are the three story layers, and why are they effective?
(i) Unfolding in the present time is protagonist Jamal’s ordeal in custody, as he explains to his ruthless police interrogators how he really did know the answers and he’s not guilty of the highest-profile fraud in Indian media history. He tells his own story, which leads into…
(ii) Unfolding in flashback, we see choice fragments of Jamal’s turbulent life as it relates to the questions he’s posed by the TV quizmaster. Cutting back and forth in time, we experience the hardships behind the answers, and in the process beginning to realise the major motivating factor in Jamal’s existence is…
(iii) Unfolding in flashback, the love story of how Jamal falls for then loses his childhood sweetheart Latika, and his quest to get her back which in turn influences the course of narrative strand (ii).
Director Danny Boyle and his editor Chris Dickens do an impeccable job of moving the visuals between these three threads, though for the most part they follow the template set down by Beaufoy’s script (now available for your perusal in published form from Nick Hearn Books and available to win here by scrolling to the foot of this page). It seems curious at first that the film starts with the interrogation, since you’d imagine that might have been kept for the killer moment in the story where the big money prize is in sight and poor Jamal finds himself yanked from the TV studio into a police cell, where they’re very soon attaching electrodes to his feet. Sticking to a chronological route through Jamal’s story would have created its own problems however, since there would naturally be huge leaps between the childhood incidents signalling the answers to the quiz questions, and Jamal answering those questions on the show years later. So, the option to keep the quiz show material to the end is as much of a non-starter as the rigid question/answer format followed by the source novel.
What it means to tell your own story
Arguably, the film’s key screenwriting decision is using the police interrogation to allow Jamal to tell his own story, bringing voiceover and flashback strands (ii) and (iii) into play. This is significant because it gives Jamal’s voice a chance to wrest ownership of the story away from the tyranny of the TV gameshow format, introducing the ‘lost love’ strand (iii) which we discover means more to him than winning the rupees. Initially, we’re not sure why he’s chosen to go on the show, since he doesn't seem like an obvious quiz champ, but relatively early on we sense that it’s somehow connected to his faithful passion for his childhood sweetheart Latika – which suddenly makes it about more than money, but about love and loyalty and hope and resilience. Now it’s a real story not just a TV format.
Multi-tasking through flashbacks
The difficulty with picaresque tales in which children grow to maturity is that they can seem terribly episodic on screen, but here that issue is circumvented because it’s Jamal who’s selecting the relevant bits of his past to explain himself with the police. This also conveys the passing of time and allows the film to work through three different sets of actors playing Jamal, his best friend Salim and his beloved Latika without the viewer ever getting confused. That said, if Jamal’s life story strand (ii) is simply being woven in and out of the questions on the TV show isn’t that still going to come across as as rigid and contrived, dissipating the tension of progress towards even larger prize money?
Well, possibly it would do if Beaufoy hadn’t obviously thought of this prospective pitfall in advance and made sure he kept the uncertainties of the seemingly ill-fated Latika love story strand (iii) at his disposal to cover any potential lapses in tension. After all, we know there wouldn’t really be a movie unless Jamal does really well on the show, so we expect him to have the answers – the fun is in seeing just how that plays out. Most of the time, we cut from the quiz question into Jamal’s dramatised memories to find the answer, but Beaufoy’s smart enough to mix it up so the viewer doesn’t get too complacent – there’s an instance where Jamal has the answer right off, and the audience has to wait for the relevant flashback to work out how he knew it. Still, after one particularly painful childhood incident, where Jamal and Salim escape from an evil gang leader only for Latika to be left behind, the issue of whether Salim and Latika will ever be re-united looms just as large in our concerns as his success on the quiz show. As such, the movie now has us worrying on several fronts:
Will Jamal make it through the police interrogation? And if he does, where will that leave him in terms of the TV quiz?
If he does face some stinker of a question on the show, will he have had the requisite life experience to answer it, or will he have to take his chances with destiny?
Will Jamal and Latika ever find lasting happiness when fate has conspired to keep them apart?
This is the basis of feel-good filmmaking, stacking the odds and loading uncertainty against the protagonist before conjuring up their eventual triumph. Put it like that and it sounds too easy, however. Suspiciously mechanical, in fact, which is why maestro Beaufoy has another trick up his sleeve…
Jamal and LatikaProductive distraction: the interesting best friend
So, we know plucky, determined Jamal hasn’t had it easy, what with the police interrogators refusing to believe him and the quiz master being a supercilious slimebag, but once we’ve grasped the plot structure and the movie’s barrelling along, there’s a danger the audience might feel they’ve got it all worked out. Okay, so the good guy answers all the questions to get the money and the girl in the end. Even with all the question marks against Jamal, it would seem that the story needs an extra injection of doubt to keep terminal predictability at bay – which is where best pal Salim comes in.
Yes, we relate to Jamal because he’s stubborn, has a mischievous streak, and is doing it all for love rather than money, but he is pretty much a constant. That’s why the movie needs Salim to have a richer and more eventful character journey, so that the course of their turbulent friendship not only adds tension to the overall outcome, but actually carries the theme of the whole film – that love and loyalty shape their own destiny. While romantic need is Jamal’s driving force, with Salim it’s a desire to better himself through becoming a somebody in the criminal underworld. As such, the fiercely courageous Salim is Jamal’s rescuer on occasion, but he’s also Jamal’s betrayer. It might seem like such a cliché to have the best friend come between the hero and his love, but Beaufoy’s script embraces such paradigm story elements with a positively Dickensian enthusiasm because the backdrop of Mumbai, where rich and poor live side by side in a fast-changing social flux, is a context which can support (perhaps even demands) such storytelling primary colours – it’s what Bollywood has been doing for decades.
Danny Boyle on stage for The Script Factory Indeed, it’s Salim’s various interventions which provide the rollercoaster of serial triumph and reversal which is the Jamal/Latika thread. He brings them together and wrenches them apart when the viewer least expects it, sending out the message that even though we think the movie’s odds-on for a happy ending, perhaps we shouldn’t be so confident after all. Moreover, Salim’s ultimate conversion to selfless devotion over self-interested malfeasance, achieved at the cost of fatal self-sacrifice, indicates definitively to the viewer that Jamal’s values have prevailed. Salim’s gratuitous act of loyalty towards his friend – and also a gesture of atonement for his behaviour towards Latika – is one of the crucial enabling factors bringing Jamal and Latika back together again for good.
Know your exit strategy
Jamal and Latika, together at last. Getting ahead of ourselves here, aren’t we? First, there’s the issue of getting Jamal out of police custody. This was helpful in setting up the flashbacks, but now that it’s served its purpose, the police are convinced enough to know Jamal’s been truthful all along, so he’s free to get back on the show to face the final big-money question – thus, the story moves back into the present. This is a textbook demonstration in coming out of flashbacks while the story’s major questions remain unanswered, because it keeps the story alive as long as possible.
Beaufoy is now able to pay off on the question/answer patterns he’s shown us earlier in the proceedings by presenting Jamal with a final quiz poser past events have demonstrated to us he definitely doesn’t know. At the risk of losing everything, he accepts the challenge and takes the phone a friend option, turning a familiar gameshow device into a pivotal story moment where the sound of Latika’s voice is at once evidence that she’s safe, indication that Salim has saved the day, and a signal for Salim’s betrayed mobster boss to kill him. Everything in the film converges in this one breathtaking moment, and it doesn’t matter that Latika’s stumped for the answer, this triumphant vindication of love and loyalty gives Jamal the confidence to fly by instinct and select the correct answer. Love and loyalty shape their own destiny: this is twenty million rupees’ worth of proof. Cue guaranteed cheers from the audience, setting the seal on a movie whose effective uplift once again demonstrates that if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the screen. Salim aside, this isn’t a film of complex characters, but of big, primary emotions being made to matter by a tightly focused screenplay which skilfully cajoles the audience into caring and sharing.
Hints and Tips
Telling a life story through flashback can be an effective way of telescoping time, especially if its combined with a narration which has a point to prove or a moral to draw out relating to these events.
Bracketing the film’s entire events within a voiceover-led flashback can serve to dissipate tension because we know the protagonist/narrator has made it through, so it’s often a good idea to create an exit point where the story continues in the present time with its key questions remaining unanswered.
If you're setting up a story which devolves into a certain pattern, be alive to the need for variation so the audience doesn’t feel they’re stuck in the same groove.
A hero who’s a very model of constancy can be an inspirational figure, but it can be an idea to play off this sort of character against a friend or rival whose own development can exert pressure on the protagonist, undercutting any tendency for the story’s presumed upbeat destination to become too predictable.
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2009
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.
The screenplay, Slumdog Millionaire has just been published by Nick Hern Books in a handsome volume containing the script, stills from the film and an introduction and Q&A with Danny Boyle.
Nick Hern Books have generously given us two copies of the book to give away to the first two names we randomly pick out of the in-box who can answer (in true Who Wants To Be A Millionaire form) the following question:
Photo: The Script Factory
Simon Beaufoy - the surprise DJ at a Script Factory party
Simon Beaufoy’s previous screenplay was for a film directed by Bharat Nalluri. Was it called Miss Pettigrew Lives For…
[A] a month
[B] a day
[C] an hour
or
[D] a week
You either know it, can phone a friend – or just use the IMDB like everyone else…
Answers in an email to general@scriptfactory.co.uk by Friday 6 February 2009 – and please put SLUMDOG in the subject field.