As he was wandering around the slums of Mumbai, Simon Beaufoy, a very pale, smallish, blondish English screenwriter, noticed packs of stray dogs lining the tiny, crowded alleyways.
"The dogs would sit in the sun, apparently asleep," he says. "They were really mangy. Absolutely rabies-on-legs-type dogs. And you had to tread carefully over them. Man, if you trod on their tail, you'd be dead. They always appeared to be asleep, but if you looked closely, you'd see one of their eyes a tiny bit open. They were watching everything.
"It was a nice metaphor for the lowest of the low," Beaufoy recalls, "for this person who apparently knows nothing, who is worthless, but actually he's been watching all his life, and he knows everything."
That's why Beaufoy coined the title "Slumdog Millionaire" for the name of his new movie, directed by Danny Boyle. Slumdog -- a word that doesn't exist in Hindi -- refers to the title character, Jamal, a street urchin who claws his way into adulthood and winds up a contestant on the Indian version of the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Jamal is poised to win 20 million rupees when he's summarily arrested and accused of cheating.
The Boyle-Beaufoy collaboration has already stormed the film-festival circuit this fall and brought awards attention back to Beaufoy, who was nominated for almost every writing award a decade ago for his first produced screenplay, "The Full Monty."
"Slumdog Millionaire" is based loosely on "Q & A: A Novel," which is more a collection of short stories, by Vikas Swarup. Aside from the original conceit, the operatic, kinetic narrative of the film -- along with its intricate structure -- springs from Beaufoy, who deftly balances a fusion of memory and reality, of Jamal's nerve-racking stint on the TV show, his brutal police interrogation, the story of his hardscrabble life and the idiosyncratic fashion by which he's come to know the answers to the "Millionaire" questions.
The film evokes what Beaufoy calls "the rapacious development" of modern India. "The place is on steroids," says the writer, who immersed himself for weeks in the neighborhoods of Mumbai, hunting for stories, listening to conversations at tea stands where patrons were imbibing "sweet tea that burns the enamel off your teeth" and discussing gangsters with them, and catching wondrous, weird sights that wound up in the movie, like a row of pay outhouses lined up by an airfield where Indian movie stars would land in their planes. "It's the most amazing Dickensian city of extremes. It must be like New York in the 1890s or Victorian London, with all the extremes crammed in one place, the extremes of wealth and poverty.
