‘Slumdog’ on the streets of Mumbai

The trailer for Slumdog Millionaire yesterday showed us a vibrant side of urban India rarely recorded with such authenticity in Bollywood productions — and the difference is that Danny Boyle took the cameras out of the studio and onto the streets. Reuters UK has an interesting piece about the logistical difficulties of filming on the streets of Mumbai:

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.

The most fascinating part of the article, for me is a glimpse at the techniques of total immersion the filmmakers used to remain as inconspicuous as possible when capturing crowd scenes. An explanation of how they achieved this cinematic anonymity after the jump.

Even with approval, the production was keen on keeping intrusion to a minimum and used multiple cameras to make that happen. Because walking around with a photographic camera was more accepted than a movie camera, Dod Mantle sometimes used a Canon Cam — a high-res stills camera that can shoot up to 12 frames a second — for scenes that required a heightened sensibility. He also used the SI-2K, a tiny digital camera he could hold the lens of in the palm of one hand and a minuscule monitor in the other; wires went up his sleeve and into a backpack carrying a hard drive.

Protection of expensive camera equipment was another consideration:

“Slumdog” quickly discovered the Indian version of movie insurance: per orders, every lens, every light, every piece of equipment came with one or more guards who would lie on mats and keep an eye on the assigned gear.

“In Mumbai, you don’t get insurance, you get six guards to guard your camera,” Colson says. “With that kind of setup, it’s hard to keep your crew small.”

Judging from what we’ve seen, the efforts were worth it. One thing that outstanding Best Picture contender must do is show us the world in a way that’s visually arresting and take us places we’ve never seen before. Danny Boyle never framed a prosaic shot in his career and he knows the importance of dynamic style when enhancing his substance with a flourish of cinematic poetry.