Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel: an underdog no more
With his nomination for best actor in the Baftas, Dev Patel is going head-to-head with Brad Pitt. Such is his rapid rise he is staying in a suite at Mumbai's J W Marriott, the five-star hotel favoured by Bollywood stars, with its spas and infinity pools looking out over the Arabian Sea.
Given that he has never had any formal training as an actor, his performance in Slumdog Millionaire, the film that propelled him into award contention among Hollywood superstars, seems precociously assured and nuanced. There is a real stillness and depth, which may be why acting legends such as Clint Eastwood and Sir Ben Kingsley have been queuing up to praise him and shake his hand. Critics and awards judges, meanwhile, have been running out of superlatives. One consensus seems to be that he is 'a natural'.
Modestly, he attributes his being cast to pure luck.
Controversy and acclaim, acclaim and controversy: one or the other can make for a decent showing at the box office. But add them together and you have something combustible, something rare, a cultural phenomenon. Such is Slumdog Millionaire, a film about a boy from the slums of Mumbai who is one question away from winning the Hindi version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? When arrested on suspicion of cheating, he tells the police chief the tragicomic story of his life on the streets, and of the girl he loved and lost. By turns savage and sentimental, his flashbacks explain how he knew the answers.
The momentum for this film began a few weeks ago when it won four Golden Globes. Then came 11 Bafta nominations, with the winners to be announced tonight. Slumdog, as it is now customarily shortened, looks set to sweep all before it at the Oscars later this month, with 10 nominations.
Yet barely a day goes by without the film finding itself mired in a new controversy. Reports that the eight-year-old actors in the film were exploited, or rather, paid a pittance before being returned to the slums, made the front pages – the criticism seemingly tapping into perceptions of Western paternalism and guilt. The following day, there were riots, with hundreds of protesters in Bihar state's capital, Patna, clashing with police, tearing down posters and ransacking a cinema after objecting to the 'humiliating' word 'dog' in the title.
And while for some Indians, the affluent ones, at least, Slumdog is too gritty – a negative film that dwells on the poverty of modern India and ignores the prosperity – for others it is not gritty enough, glossing over the grim realities of slum life to make audiences feel better about themselves (they even have slum tours there now). Then there are those who resent the film for trading in clichés and national stereotypes, for its unflattering portrayal of Indian life, rich and poor.
They argue that this is an India seen through Western eyes – after all, not only is the director British (Danny Boyle, best known for Trainspotting) but also the screenwriter (Simon Beaufoy, creator of The Full Monty) and Patel, the 18-year-old star of the film. He's from north-west London, where he still lives with his parents.
Whatever the validity of these accusations, this film is proof of one old saw: that there is no such thing as bad publicity. And its success has happened with remarkable speed, breaking records with the largest UK box office increase on the second weekend of release. Such is the pace of its world domination, indeed, when I ring Dev Patel in Mumbai the morning after the premiere there, he has not heard that Slumdog is number one at the British box office. 'No way, man!' he says. 'Wicked.'
The word 'man' punctuates many of his sentences, along with 'you know' and 'wicked'. He's young. Was 17 when filming began last year. At the time of casting, indeed, he was still a pupil at Whitmore High School, Harrow.
He also has the teenager's habit of raising his intonation at the end of a sentence, turning statements into questions. He is articulate, though, with a low and measured delivery and a dry sense of humour. His defining characteristic, he tells me, is that he can't sit still. And when at a club, he is the one standing at the back sipping his drink, not knowing quite what to do with himself. He also describes himself as bewildered and star-struck at the moment, which is fair enough.
He thought the premiere in Mumbai was 'wicked', by the way, partly because traditional Indian drummers turned up and began playing. The cast did an improvised bhangra dance down the red carpet. 'We really partied, man. There were big crowds. Lots of flashbulbs.' There were also about 25 protesters from the slums. I ask whether he picked up on any of the negative reaction. 'There was none that I could see. There is a lot of buzz about the film here because it's the first Western film to come out of Mumbai. Since it got the Golden Globes and the Bafta and Oscar nominations people feel really proud of it here. They want to see it. It's got them talking. It's not the kind of film cinema audiences here are used to. It's not Bollywood, apart from the dance sequence that comes with the closing credits.'
That choreographed dance scene was filmed on the platforms of Victoria Terminus, the Raj-era station that is a recurring location throughout the film. It is something of a parody of Bollywood, untypical of the European mood and style of the rest of the film. Bollywood movies are an acquired taste for Westerners, I suggest. What does he make of them?
'Actually, I love them. I've grown up around them. There was always one on at my grandmother's house. I loved the big fight sequences and dance sequences when I was a kid but then I grew out of it a bit in my early teens. Recently I've got back into them.' He's not sure if he would like to appear in one, however. 'Don't get me wrong though. I love this place. I would love to come back here and film something. I've fallen in love with Mumbai. It is magical.'
Patel thinks it unfair to criticise Slumdog for being unrealistic. 'It has never claimed to be a documentary. It is a movie. It is entertainment. I spent five months out here filming and really got a chance to see the slums close up and I think the film depicts them accurately enough. Mumbai really is a city of extreme contrasts. If you step out of a five-star hotel here you can be facing a slum. You sense this massive tide of humanity. The film has caught the energy and pace of Mumbai. As soon as I stepped off the plane I felt I was thrown into it. The intense wall of heat. The noise. The colours. The air smells different. Saffron and sewers. You do get used to it. And you do get numbed to the poverty.'
The film depicts slum dwellers as cheerful, but is this a cosy myth perpetuated by Western tourists?
'No, that really was my impression. The most striking thing is how happy people are in the slums. They don't seem depressed. They don't pity themselves. They are communities that flourish on their own. They elect their own head of the slum. Such a sense of community, all working together to make their slum a better slum.'
As a political campaign slogan 'make your slum a better slum' might need some work, but I take his point. Does he sense any resentment that he is a British actor taking this lead, rather than an Indian one? 'Before I came out here for this premiere that was my biggest worry, that people would think me an impostor. But everyone has been nice so far. People are looking past my background and focusing on the character I play.'
His mentor, he says, is Danny Boyle, the man who 'discovered' Ewan McGregor. What advice has the director given him? 'Keep things in perspective. If you are put on a pedestal you have further to fall off. I guess this film is selling itself. We don't need to push it too hard.'
Patel felt under considerable pressure to get the Mumbai accent right. Arriving weeks before his scenes were scheduled to shoot, he immersed himself in the atmosphere of the locations in order to absorb the mannerisms and tone.
When filming finished five months later he had what he calls a 'dead period'. 'I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. The tricky thing will be working out how to follow this film up. The next role has to be right. I don't think I should be playing 30-year-old married men yet. It's weird though. No one knew whether this film was going to be a hit or not. It was filmed on what by Hollywood standards was a modest budget.'
Five million dollars, in fact, which perhaps explains why there are no big Hollywood stars in the film, and why the child actors picked from the slums weren't paid much, by industry standards. When I ask to what he attributes the film's mass appeal there is a pause.
'It is the generic underdog story, I think. Jamal, my character, has come from nothing. And everyone loves an underdog. But it also has that rare combination of being able to make you laugh and cry and feel good and feel shocked at the same time. The most enticing thing is the location. Mumbai is like a character and audiences around the world can get a sense of it without spending money on a plane ticket.'
The slums are a character too. Some 800 million of India's population of 1.1 billion are thought to live in them, surviving on less than $2 a day. An estimated 60 per cent of Mumbai's population live in them, the largest being Dharavi. As you fly into Mumbai you get a sense of the scale of it, because it is alongside the airport – a sea of blue, plastic-roofed shanties where more than a million people are squeezed together, seemingly poised to wash over the airport in a giant, crashing wave of humanity. In one tableaux, the modern and the ancient India are merged.
At one point Patel's character, Jamal, runs away from the slums with his brother, after their Muslim community is attacked by a Hindu mob and their mother is killed. After this the orphans scavenge on a rubbish dump before being lured to a 'children's home' by a Fagin-like character who later tries to blind one of the boys with acid so he can earn more from his begging. Other scenes include a girl becoming a prostitute, a child crawling through an outside lavatory pit to get a glimpse of his Bollywood film hero, and a boy becoming a hired killer. Small wonder that on the blog of Amitabh Bachchan – the biggest star of Indian cinema and the star whose autograph the child crawls through the sewage for – the film was criticised for its focus on the country's seedy underworld.
Yet Slumdog has also been called the first film of the Obama era, because it is a feel-good movie with a fairytale ending. I wonder if there is an element, too, of it helping to heal the city of Mumbai after the recent terrorist attack. 'Possibly,' Patel says. 'Restoring the city's confidence, you mean. I was out here for five months and I couldn't believe it when I saw the Victoria station on the news being attacked by terrorists. The heart of it was destroyed. But I got a real sense working here that it is a place of optimism and that it will always bounce back. Things move at a million miles an hour.'
Before filming began Patel did not, he confesses, know much about India. He had first visited the country as a 10-year-old attending a wedding in Gujarat, and wasn't impressed. 'I was bitten by mosquitoes, got the runs, the toilets were holes in the ground. I hated it. But going out eight years later, I really appreciated it.'
I ask about the opening sequence in which his character is tortured by Mumbai police. How has that gone down? 'I don't know what the police made of it. I haven't seen much of that side of Mumbai, but I have read a book called Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and that goes into the interrogation techniques the police use. But this is a movie, people need to take those scenes with a pinch of salt, you know.'
The torture scenes were realistic, though. Was a stunt man used? 'No, that was me. There was a fine line between making it look realistic and it becoming an over-the-top Jim Carrey scene. But it just clicked. We did a pre-shoot in which we searched for locations and the torture scenes were actually my first unofficial day of filming. My introduction to film acting was being slapped and having my head pushed into a bucket of water to simulate drowning. Nice.'
Although Slumdog is his first feature film, Patel had appeared in front of a camera before, as a priapic teenager in Skins, the cult E4 series aimed at teenagers. 'I didn't really know what I was doing in that. I had to learn to pitch my performance to the camera rather than doing it for the benefit of my parents in the front room at home. I look at my performance in Skins now and I cringe.'
His character in Slumdog falls in love; has he ever been in love? 'No, man. I'm too young. I was 17 when I was playing that character and I was having to imagine what it was like to be in love. I guess I got to learn about it in a controlled environment.'
After their first love scene his beautiful co-star, Freida Pinto, told him she felt like a paedophile because of their age difference (she is 24). Does he have a girlfriend now? 'No, no time, man. No time to sleep or eat, let alone have a girlfriend.'
What about the groupie side of film stardom? 'It's crazy,
man, you do get some very clinging people, but usually they are well wishers.'
Diplomatically put. His maturity and confidence is striking. 'I think I have matured. I matured five years in five months during filming. And I think after Skins I was really eager to show I had a different side. The thought that Danny cast me out of all these people gave me confidence.'
Modestly, he attributes his being cast to pure luck. Danny Boyle's daughter happened to be a fan of Skins and suggested Patel. Until that point Boyle had been looking at Indian actors, who were proving too muscular, the wrong physical shape. Young Indian actors tend to work out a lot in the gym, it seems, as that is the look favoured in Bollywood. Patel felt like crying after his audition, thinking it had gone badly. When he went off for a consolation pizza with his mother, it tasted sour. Then the call came.
'As it turned out Danny was looking for someone like me who looks like they grew up in a slum, someone lanky and skinny and not particularly handsome.
'I guess the casting could have gone either way. I believe in fate a bit because of that. I guess I have to. I feel incredibly blessed right now. I'm a bit religious. Not much. Not like my parents, who are practising.'
His parents are Kenyan-born Hindus, his mother a carer, his father an IT consultant. How has his success changed his relationship with them?
'I don't think my relationship with them has changed, actually. That is what keeps me grounded.
'I come out here and live out of a suitcase and I do press and I get treated like an adult, but when I go home I'm treated like a kid again – an 18-year-old kid who wants to play with his friends. Still use public transport. Still have a messy room. Still get told off by my parents for not doing the washing up. Still annoy my sister. That's me, you know.'
He says that as far as he knows none of his friends feel envious of his sudden fame.
'No, they are really proud of me. They have been really supportive. It is your peer group that forms your character. If it hadn't been for them, you know, having them to mess about with, and having them encouraging me to become the class clown, then… ' He trails off.
'That's why I got a reputation and got dragged into the school play. I wouldn't have thought of it otherwise.'
Drama was his best subject at school. English second best. Did he have a nickname? 'Big Ears. I'm proud to have big ears now, though. I mean, look who's the most powerful man in the world. Barack Obama. Big ears are in fashion.'
Dev Patel is 6ft 1in and has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do; presumably people don't call him nicknames any more. 'I'm harmless. Wouldn't hurt a fly. But they do still call me nicknames, now I'm known as Slumdog.'
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