The feature film Slumdog Millionaire (Director Danny Boyle, Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle) screened at the Camerimage Film Festival this week. In the enchanting and sweeping comedy, Danny Boyle tells a love story about a teenager in the slums of Mumbai who wins the Indian version of the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Segments of Slumdog Millionaire were shot handheld with a P+S Technik SI-2K Mini Camera Head and recorded on a ruggedized notebook recording unit last fall/winter in India. Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle was supported by German DIT and B-unit cameraman Stefan Ciupek.

	Dev Patel (Jamal Malik) and Freida Pinto (Latika) Click for Large Image

Though the production team planned to shoot primarily on 35mm film and use the SI-2K only for scenes that take place in the Mumbai slums, more than half of the film was shot with the SI-2K in the end.

Shooting in the Maximum City: The Mumbai Production of Slumdog Millionaire
The story of Slumdog Millionaire unfolds in Mumbai (Bombay), one of the densest, wildest, fasting moving cities in the world, rife with both danger and magic, dreams and despair, luxury and poverty—the city that author Suketu Mehta memorably dubbed the “maximum city” in his novel of the same name, a symbol of the vastly diverse megalopolises of the future in which the fates of rich and poor will be closely intertwined. With a population of over 19 million and rapidly growing, Mumbai is set to replace Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020 according to estimates. It is already the world’s most crowded city, with some 30,000 people pressed into every square kilometer of space. And though it features luxury shopping, sun-soaked beaches and hip nightlife, it is also a city where as many of 50 percent of the citizens live in shantytowns, ghettoes or on the streets.

	Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Click for Large Image

For Danny Boyle, the challenge was to capture the light and dark contrasts of the city with fresh eyes—creating a visceral, immediate experience for audiences, immersing them in its sweltering heat and teeming corridors. His plan was to shoot in the heart of the city’s infamous but rarely explored slums, capturing their energy and urgency on-the-fly, with an unforced realism.  

Mumbai’s high-contrast mix of heartbreaking poverty and technological advancement especially fascinated Boyle. “I’ve been to slums before but in different places in the world, like Kibera in Kenya, but this was different in all its contradictions. There’s this smell you get first of all ... this incredible mixture of excrement and then saffron, a mixture of the sweet and the sour,” he laughs. “India’s one of the world’s leading nuclear powers on the one hand, but on the other hand, there are no public toilets.”

	Director Danny Boyle and Freida Pinto, who plays Latika, the love of Jamal's life. Click for Large Image

All of these observations and sensations became part of the intensely textured fabric of the film. Says screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, “I don’t think people living in Mumbai see Mumbai as extraordinary. But what Danny, Christian and I were able to bring to it, as outsiders, is an open-mouthed sense of awe.”

The task of shooting amidst the bustle of these ramshackle cities-within-the-city fell to Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle, who most recently shot Last King of Scotland and has previously worked with Boyle shooting 28 Days Later and Millions. Mantle had to be extremely flexible in his shooting methods.

	L-R: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor, who plays Prem, the flustered, egotistical host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Click for Large Image

The crew originally planned to shoot certain scenes using SI-2K digital cameras and shoot the rest of the movie on film, but Boyle was adamant that he did not want to take large, cumbersome 35mm cameras into the slums. The smaller, more flexible digital cameras enabled them to shoot quickly with much less disturbance to the local communities.

For Boyle, it came down to trial and error to find the right shooting process. “We started off using classical kinds of film cameras and I didn’t like it. I wanted to feel really involved in the city. I didn’t want to be looking at it, examining it,” he explains. “I wanted to be thrown right into the chaos as much as possible. There’s a period of time between about 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. where it all stops and just the dogs move around, but other than that, the place is just a tide of humanity.”

	Director Danny Boyle in front of the Taj Mahal, which in the film is mistaken for heaven. Click for Large Image

The hyperkinetic chase sequence involving the young Jamal and Salim at the beginning of the film, in particular, was filmed incrementally, built up, like a montage over a period of time. Whenever possible, the crew would return to the location and film another section of the chase.

“Anthony was able to hand-hold the SI-2Ks,” recalls Boyle. “Although they had a gyro on them to stabilize them, they were still very small and could operate in very small, narrow areas, which is what you get in the slums. You can capture a bit of the life that’s going on around you without people realizing it and becoming self-conscious.”

	L-R: Dev Patel and Irrfan Khan Click for Large Image

Boyle continues: “We also used what we called a ‘CanonCam,’ which was a Canon stills camera, which takes 12 frames a second. If people see a still camera, they don’t think it is recording live action. We’d record stuff like that, as well as occasionally using the traditional film camera—so it’s a mixture of different technologies that we used in the film. Whoever was operating the camera would have a hard drive strapped to their back, which would record the images while the camera was in their hand. Anthony would look like a rather cumbersome tourist from Denmark who was wandering around the slums,” laughs Boyle, “but actually what he was doing was filming.”