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Slumdog Millionaire

Interview Transcript

4) British audiences will be familiar with Dev Patel from Skins. There are other moments in the film that speak very directly to the British/Indian relationship, (the call centre, EastEnders reference etc.). How easy was it to draw on these shared cultural experiences? Do you think British audiences will connect easily to the world inhabited by Jamal?

Yes I always assumed that the film would work in Britain much better than say it would in America. Now, it’s been released in America first and is working really well there, which astonished me because I always thought they’ll never get it in America because they won’t understand about EastEnders or they won’t understand about Dev Patel from Skins, and things like that. But actually they love it for different reasons I think, it’s more for them, it’s more like the Rocky story. It’s about a kid who has nothing, you know, but a dream, and he will get that dream. And the success in the end is not about money, it’s actually about a girl and that’s the kind of Rocky story really you know and they love that story being retold in America. It’s about the optimism they value as part of the Psyche of the Nation really. We’re a bit more bitter and cynical in Britain, so you come at it in a slightly different way. Well I think you will, I don’t know. It hasn’t been released here yet, but I hope people will find access to the film. We have a much more visible Indian population here and I’m very proud to live in the East End of London. It’s a 60% Bengali area you know, and people like Dev from Skins, he’s a London lad, who people will recognise and love from Skins. They love his character from Skins and I hope they’ll be able to make the journey to this film with him. And yes, there are other references which pass Americans by, like the reference to EastEnders. We changed one reference actually because at one point in the call centre he said, he claimed to this woman that he lived right next-door to Detective Taggart’s flat but we had to change that because, of course, in America they just go, Detective Taggart? So we changed that to Sean Connery’s flat which is actually a better line. That he lives right next door to Sean Connery’s flat, claiming that he comes from Scotland like she does. But yeah, I hope it’s a film that can be celebrated across a number of communities in Britain and certainly we’re doing a screening. We’ve done a couple of Hindi screenings already with Hindi audiences because there’s a huge audience here that goes to the Bollywood films which is a kind of secret audience. Every Bollywood film that’s released each week, there’s one each week that’s in the top ten in the U.K. usually, or hovering near there. And that’s a huge audience that we hope the film will appeal to as well.