Director Danny Boyle admits Slumdog Millionaire 'would never be made today' unless Indian filmmakers were at the helm

Daily Mail​

20-06-2025

Director Danny Boyle has admitted that Slumdog Millionaire 'would never be made today' unless Indian filmmakers were at the helm.
The producer, 68, reflected on the 2008 movie which he directed as he said him and the team in Mumbai who shot the scenes were 'outsiders'.
The film was a loose adaptation of the novel Q & A by Indian author Vikas Swarup and followed the story of teenager Jamal (Dev Patel) from the slums of Mumbai.
He becomes a contestant on the show 'Kaun Banega Crorepati?' and when interrogated under suspicion of cheating, he revisits his past, revealing how he had all the answers.
Danny told The Guardian: 'Yeah, we wouldn't be able to make that now. And that's how it should be.
'It's time to reflect on all that. We have to look at the cultural baggage we carry and the mark that we've left on the world.'
'We made the decision that only a handful of us would go to Mumbai. We'd work with a big Indian crew and try to make a film within the culture. But you're still an outsider. It's still a flawed method.
'I'm proud of the film, but you wouldn't even contemplate doing something like that today. It wouldn't even get financed. Even if I was involved, I'd be looking for a young Indian film-maker to shoot it.'
The moviemaker has recently stepped back into the director's chair to helm the new horror 28 Years Later - written by Alex Garland - 23 years after the pair's first film 28 Days Later hit cinemas.
He recently admitted it was a 'nightmare' filming naked zombies for new horror movie.
Danny has revealed they needed to take extra care not to have 'naked' actors on the set because they had strict rules in place to protect the film's child star Alfie Williams.
Speaking to PEOPLE, Danny explained: 'I mean, if you're recently infected [with the zombie virus], you'd have some clothes, but if you've been infected for a long time, the clothes would just disintegrate with the way that you behave.
'We never knew that [about rules governing nudity on set when there's a child present] going in, it was a nightmare.'
Danny went on to explain the work-around they came up with, adding: 'Interestingly, because there was a 12-year-old boy on set, you're not allowed for anybody to be naked, not really naked, so they look naked, but it's all prosthetics ...
'So it's like: 'Oh my God,' so we had to make everybody prosthetic genitals'.'
Danny revealed he was keen to push boundaries with the elements of nudity and gore in the film and he's glad studio bosses were supportive of his plans.
He told Variety: 'I think one of the wonderful things about horror is that you're expected to maximize the impact of your story. Everybody wants to do that with a drama, with the romance, whatever.
'But with horror, it's obviously gonna be brutal, some of it. What we loved was setting it against an innocence that's represented by the various children in it, and also the landscape, the beauty of the landscape, the nature.
'Having those two forces stretches your story as far as you can go, if you maximize them. That was our principle and the studio was supportive of that, of course they were.'
On Thursday critics weighed in on the new zombie horror movie.
A follow-up to the 'great' 2002 film 28 Days Later, Boyle and Garland assembled a star-studded cast including Harry Potter star Ralph Fiennes, 62, and fellow Brit Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 35, for their latest endeavor.
Two decades on from the original which saw a deadly virus plague London, the new movie finds a group of survivors living on the secluded island of Lindisfarne.
Boyle and Garland's new project has received a heap of positive reviews from critics following early screenings.
Rotten Tomatoes for instance have handed the movie an impressive 94 percent critic approval rating after rounding up the thoughts of more than 91 film reviewers.
The Daily Mail's Brian Viner was incredibly impressed after watching the series' latest gory installment, dubbing the movie the 'best post-apocalyptic horror-thriller film I have ever watched'.
Brian wrote: 'With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic survivalist horror-thriller film I have ever seen. Which sounds like limited praise, yet it's a much more crowded field than you might think.'
Robbie Collin in The Telegraph also handed 28 Years Later a rave review, with the critic scoring the 'terrifying' horror movie five stars out of five.
'Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour - very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 - to undercut the ambient dread,' Collin wrote.
'And flashes of Arthurian fantasias and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree_ serve as regularly nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle ty with the notion of a 21st century British national myth.'
The film too received five stars from The Times critic Ed Potton, who hailed Jodie Comer's 'impressive as always' performance.
The journalist wrote: 'Is this the most beautiful zombie film of them all? It's hard to think of another that combines such wonder and outlandishness with the regulation flesh-rending, brain-munching and vicious disembowelment.'
The BBC 's Caryn James gave the highly-anticipated film four stars out of five as she dubbed Ralph Fiennes's performance 'scene-stealing'.
'28 Years Later is part zombie-apocalypse horror, part medieval world building, part sentimental family story and - most effectively - part Heart of Darkness in its journey towards a madman in the woods,' she wrote.
'It glows with Boyle's visual flair, Garland's ambitious screenplay and a towering performance from Ralph Fiennes, whose character enters halfway through the film and unexpectedly becomes its fraught sole'.
Empire also awarded 28 Years Later four stars out of five, with journalist Ben Travis writing: '28 Years Later is ferocious, fizzing with adrenaline. The mainland thrums with a pervasive sense of immediate danger; when the infected arrive (and, do they arrive), it is breathlessly tense.'
Reviews in The Guardian and The Independent were slightly more critical however, with journalists scoring 28 Years Later with three stars.
Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian: 'A little awkwardly, the film has to get us on to the mainland for some badass action sequences with real shooting weaponry - and then we have the two 'alpha' cameos that it would be unsporting to reveal, but which cause the film to shunt between deep sadness and a bizarre, implausible (though certainly startling) graphic-novel strangeness.'
While The Independent 's Clarisse Loughley wrote: 'Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle's still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.'
28 Years Later has become the best horror ticket pre-seller of 2025, with the film expected to gross around $30million in its first weekend.
28 YEARS LATER - THE REVIEWS
The Daily Mail (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
With the terrifying and electrifying 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have delivered the best post-apocalyptic horror-thrill I have ever seen.
The Times (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
Jodie Comer is impressive as always in the latest instalment of the post-apocalyptic series
The Telegraph (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
This transfixingly nasty zombie horror sequel, starring Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, is Danny Boyle's best film in 15 years
The Evening Standard (FIVE STARS)
Rating:
Jodie Comer, young Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes have a monsters' ball in this supercharged third outing for the 28 Days Later series
BBC Culture (FOUR STARS)
Rating:
Alex Garland and Danny Boyle have reunited for a follow-up to their 2002 classic. It has visual flair, terrifying adversaries and scene-stealing performance from Ralph Fiennes.
Empire (FOUR STARS)
Rating:
The sequel we needed is both the film you expect, and the one you don't. There's blood, but also real guts and brain and heart - visceral cinema soaked in viscera.
The Guardian (THREE STARS)
Rating:
This tonally uncertain revival mixes folk horror and little-England satire as an island lad seeks help for his sick mum on the undead-infested mainland.
The Independent (THREE STARS)