"Slumdog" crew took to the streets of Mumbai

By Borys Kit

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - India's film industry might be the biggest in the world, but the Hollywood producers of the Mumbai-set rags-to-rupees tale "Slumdog Millionaire" found that shooting there was hardly a walk in the Taj Mahal.

While India's massive infrastructure churns out more than 900 films a year -- many of them fancy spectacles as shiny as classic MGM musicals -- Bollywood producers never stray from soundstages.

For authenticity purposes, director Danny Boyle and his crew took their story about an impoverished contestant on India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" to a place unheard of in Indian film production: the streets.

"Bollywood does not film on the streets," producer Christian Colson says. "It knows better than to do that."

Mumbai, with a metropolitan population of more than 19 million, is a teeming mass of humanity piled on top of one another in ways that are vibrant and inspiring as well as soul-sapping and disconcerting. The production discovered that some days, travelling a distance of three miles to a location took -- no joke -- three hours. During some shots, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle found himself separated from Boyle by dozens of people even though the director was only a dozen feet away.

"It was bonkers," Dod Mantle recalls about the constant crush of flesh.

The city and country are no longer just about Gandhi and cricket but rather are examples of capitalistic growth on crack. A location chosen six months earlier during preproduction could be the site of a sparkling new tower by the time the film crew arrived.

Some of the more challenging shoots took place in the city's infamous mega-slum Dharavi and the shantytown known as the Juhu slum. "Slumdog," which Fox Searchlight will release November 12 in the U.S., used production service outfit India Take One Prods. to help negotiate access to locations, but in the slums, a certain amount of finesse was involved.