'Slumdog's' Boyle prefers piloting nimble films

Danny Boyle once commanded his own oil tanker. Evidently, it wasn't a whole lot of fun.

Worlds collide beautifully in 'Slumdog Millionaire'

"It's very unmovable," the British director of "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" confides in his Scottsdale hotel suite. "It takes a whole afternoon to change direction. It's laden down with wonderful things, but not very nimble.

"Don't get me wrong. Some people do it superbly. But I'm not one of them."

So, are we to believe that the decade's most superlative indie filmmaker has been moonlighting in the shipping industry? Not exactly. "Oil tanker" is Boyle's pet term for a big-budget studio production - the kind of star-laden vessel, in other words, that he never directs.

Well, almost never. There was "The Beach," the sun-flushed 2000 thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It was supposed to be DiCaprio's big, post-"Titanic" victory lap. Instead, the movie stumbled at the box office and, for a time, drove Boyle to seek refuge in television work. The ordeal also soured his fruitful working relationship with screenwriter John Hodge, who wrote the scripts for "Trainspotting" (1996) and Boyle's well-received debut feature, "Shallow Grave" (1995).

"It just kind of (messed) with my head, all that money," Boyle says of the estimated $50 million production. "Everything just gets inflated, with the star, with the crew. And it's not that the star wants you to lose control, because an actor like DiCaprio is very director-orientated.

"But the film does slip away from you a little bit."

In maritime terms, Boyle is more of a corvette kind of filmmaker. He prefers smaller crews, less A-list baggage and the kind of lighter, more responsive production that can navigate the tricky demographic fjords of independent filmmaking.

Heaven knows, it would have been a simple matter for Boyle to go big-time after "28 Days Later" became a hit in 2002. The genre-crossing zombie thriller cost $8 million to make and grossed over $70 million worldwide. But he stayed the course, as it were, and opted for a pair of relatively low-profile follow-ups: "Millions" (2004), a sweet, modern-day parable about a pair of young brothers who find an illicit bag of cash, and "Sunshine" (2007), a sensually intoxicating sci-fi drama about a last-ditch mission to save the sun.

Boyle's latest film, "Slumdog Millionaire," is another odd-shaped gem. Penned by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy ("Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), the film follows the hardscrabble life adventures of Jamal (Indian-Anglo star Dev Patel), a dirt-poor, uneducated Muslim teen accused of cheating his way to a fortune on the Indian version of the TV game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" In the style of "The Usual Suspects," Jamal is interrogated by a skeptical police detective (Irfan Khan from "The Namesake") to whom he relates each of the pivotal life events that shaped his quiz-show expertise.

Culturally, "Slumdog Millionaire" represents a bold new leap for Boyle. In its most tragic moments, it plays like an enraged expose on the plight of Indian orphans. But it's also the kind of footloose, pure-cinema thriller that Boyle does best, where "everything comes at you at 100 miles per hour."

"Usually there's a bag of money in there somewhere, either metaphorically of literally," Boyle says, playfully summing up his oeuvre. "And a girl. It's always girls and money."

True to Boyle form, "Slumdog Millionaire" also lacks big-name actors, which is why he traveled all the way to Scottsdale from his home in Britain to promote the movie.

"If you don't have a big movie star, you have to work," Boyle, a thin, energetic man who bears a passing likeness to '80s rock icon Morrissey, admits. "And that's why they get paid $20 million. It's not for being in the movie - it's for doing the three days of publicity when they're talking to every journalist in America. Otherwise, you got to chop around, speak to people about it. But I like doing publicity. You find out a lot about yourself and about the film. Things you never think of."

Naturally, Boyle's tanker-averse ways grant him something else - creative integrity, and the esteem of Western art house fans who otherwise would have to find their brash, envelope-stretching films about sunlight-addicted astronauts and Indian street urchins somewhere else.

"You take less money up front, but then you try to make the film as ambitious as possible," he says. "You try to make it look like a $100 million, even though it only cost $10 million.

"And I'm much better at that."