How Slumdog Millionaire is changing film-making in India

It's boom time in Dharavi. Actually, it's always boom time in Dharavi, the Mumbai slum that's home to 600,000 people and a not inconsiderable number of businesses. Specialising in the recycling of plastic, metal and paper waste, the slum is a warren of industry, turning over an estimated $665m a year (£405m). And that was before people came wanting to see where Jamal dodged the coppers in Slumdog Millionaire. Mumbai encompasses many slums but if any has become synonymous with Danny Boyle's Oscar-herding movie, it is Dharavi. The setting for the breathtaking opening chase sequence, operators now run daily tours through the sprawling district. Like watching the movie itself, it is an oddly uplifting experience; a few hours in Dharavi – with all the colours, industry and sheer life crammed inside – feels not like wallowing in other people's poverty, but rather like being forced to contemplate your own laziness. Dharavi is now on the map, for good or ill, and it won't be long before some savvy entrepreneur designs the T-shirt to cement that fact. And it seems unlikely that the effect of Slumdog Millionaire on the country where it was set will end there. In fact, it could be said that the film is changing the very face of Indian movie-making. Slumdog Millionaire has been a huge success in India, taking more than $6m at the domestic box office since its release earlier this year. (Compare that with Dhoom 2, one of the decade's biggest-grossing films, which has raked in $17m.) And the hype for Slumdog is still continuing, with big promotional campaigns for the DVD release and an early release on satellite TV. This clamour is partly attributable to the film's eight-Oscar success, allowing national newspapers to trumpet that, at last, the Indians were coming. But as Priyanka Sinha, editor of the weekly industry magazine Screen explains, there were other factors at work too. "People liked the movie, they liked the optimism," she says. "The story was very Indian, it was very Bollywood, because Bollywood always has these impossible twists and turns, these happy endings. We're great suckers for the happy endings, we Indians. We love to see the hero win, get the girl he loves, all of that." So what may have seemed nostalgic and perhaps even naive to a British audience (why doesn't that Dev Patel give up on the girl and move on?) is an established style to an Indian one. "We have many characters like Jamal in our movies, very pure and a bit too good to be true," says Sinha. "In the initial Indian movies we would have actors who were very upright, very correct in their behaviour. Because it drew from mythology or history; there was a lot of black and white in early Hindi cinema." For Indian audiences then, while the format of the film is not unusual, the subject matter is. Loveleen Tandan is listed on the credits for Slumdog as co-director. Originally hired as casting director, her role in unearthing and developing the local kids, 40 of whom came from the slums, led Boyle to promote her during the shoot. That and the fact she was willing to point out that "bugger off" was not a phrase that Mumbai policemen readily used. Tandan is effusive about the abilities of her cast and their willingness to learn, but also that they deserved their moment in the spotlight. This is something which has proven contentious - in the media and, perhaps more notoriously, with Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, who claimed the film "projects India as a Third World dirty underbelly developing nation". "People who live in our slums are hardly ever represented in the movies," she says. "There was more exposure in the 70s and 80s but hardly any now. There is a phrase that describes slum-dwellers that roughly translates into English as 'worm from a drain'. That's why, when I heard the phrase Slumdog Millionaire, even though it was in another language, I immediately understood it. It's good that everyone has been exposed to this reality." Then there's what might be called the Slumdog style, equally unfamiliar to Indian audiences. "The style of shooting in Slumdog Millionaire was completely different from that of Indian cinema," says Cyrus Bharucha, director and now professor at the Whistling Woods International film school in Mumbai. "Indian films are still very orthodox in their photography, they use too many reflectors and lights. They would never have shot the slum sequences with a small handheld camera as Danny did. India is getting better at pacing its films but have no idea how to really cut a chase or just keep the tempo moving because so much is based on the bloody songs that interrupt the action." Ah, the bloody songs. As Sinha points out, there has been this crazy tradition in India of going to the cinema, not to have your worldview challenged or your morals shaken, but to be entertained. Likewise, Bharucha suggests that an absence of more cinema addressing the relative poverty of the slums might be because "the poor don't want to see their lives when they go to the flicks". Slumdog appears to have found its audience by entertaining them – everyone I spoke to in Mumbai, whether they disagreed with the film or not, said that they liked it – but its success has also been part of a growing trend away from Bollywood's "masala potboilers" and towards what western audiences might know as good-old arthouse cinema. Oddly, one of the major drivers behind this change has been the rise of the multiplex, particularly in regional towns and cities, which has afforded greater choice for the moviegoer. That this moviegoer has also been getting richer as India's economy has boomed, is also worth noting (as is the fact that the global recession is currently putting a damper on those very box-office receipts). What this has led to is not only an increase in foreign language movies screening across the country, but also prompted more Indian film-makers to try something different in the belief that there will be an audience for it. A case in point would be Dev.D, a homemade success to rival Slumdog at this year's box office. It's a reworking of Devdas, the classic Bengali novel about a man driven to despair when he is denied his true love because of their caste and class differences. Shahrukh Khan starred in a traditional Bollywood version, but this remake by Anurag Kashyap changes the emphasis from caste to the moral choices of individuals (and adds a bit more sex into the bargain). In the past Devdas was the simple, uncomplicated hero viewers could admire; in Dev.D he's a rotten loser. Tandan says that she and her colleagues have been trying to make more "gritty" movies like Dev.D for years, only to be knocked back by the Bollywood studios. Now, she says, "You simply add the word 'slumdog' to your pitch and suddenly that same idea is being listened to." Slumdog Millionaire was described as being a globalised movie thanks to its meshing of western and eastern forms and locations, styles and sounds. That India itself is an increasingly globalised country, however, means that more films like Slumdog will be inevitable, only this time they will be made by Indians. Perhaps, even, an enterprising film-maker from Dharavi. • Slumdog Millionaire is released on DVD and Blu-ray this week on Pathé distribution. For tours of Dharavi visit Reality Tours