SFBG: Were there any Bollywood movies in particular that inspired you, or was it just sort of a general Bollywood feel?

DB: General Bollywood feel. There's three particular ones, but they're not really Bollywood movies. There's no song and dance in them, and they're quite serious thrillers. There's one called Satya (1998), which is written by and performed by the guy in our film who plays the fat police sergeant. He's called Saurabh Shukla. He's an amazing writer and performer, and he wrote this film Satya, which is an amazing film. And there's another film called Company (2002). It's about the gangsters in Bombay, and the way [they run their business] from Dubai. And then there's another film called Black Friday (2004), which is about some bombs that went off in Bombay. And that's made by a young filmmaker called Anurag Kashyap, and that is excellent as well. So they were inspirations in a way, and then there's the Bollywood films, and they are a great mixture of some amazing sequences and some things that you find very difficult to tolerate because your custom is so different, when you're watching them. Because of the length of them and the song and dance in them, and the standards of some bits of it are — you find them a bit lacking. There's some wonderful stuff, though, to watch. Really inventive stuff, within a kind of mess sometimes.

SFBG: There's that whole song-and-dance Bollywood sequence in Slumdog Millionaire, and it feels so perfect and so unexpected at the same time.

DB: You have to do it, really, if you're there. You can't honestly live and work there for — I did about eight months there — you can't really do it and not have a dance at some point. You've got to do it. It just feels natural to do it. It's as natural as, I don't know, showing motorcars in America. You know, if you made a film about America and didn't show any motorcars, it'd be like, what? It's so natural. It's like air, really, and you've just gotta do it.

SFBG: You've done all these different genres and set them in different cultures. How do you immerse yourself and educate yourself about the cultures in order to properly reflect them?

DB: You never can fully, obviously, because you are an outsider, but obviously you hope to harness the fact that you're an outsider as well, because I think sometimes people live in cities — I certainly know, with me in London — and you don't appreciate what you're living in, because you take it for granted and it's just annoying, because it's your day-to-day life. I hope some of it is fresh because it was an outsider coming in, looking at it. But I just try and look from inside, really, as much as possible. That's all I was interested in doing, was trying to see it from inside. And I wasn't trying to impose anything on it. Obviously we had a story, but I would change bits of the story where necessary, if it felt like it was fake or it wasn't true to the people or the way they lived. So we just tried to see it from inside. Having said that, it's a classic international story, isn't it? It's an underdog who has a dream and he'll get to that dream. And it's fortunately got this device, the [Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?] device, the show device, which is universal now, ironically. It's everywhere. They're starting one in Afghanistan, supposedly. So that helps us kind of universalize the story as well, or make some of it recognizable, really, in a way. It gives you a base that you can acclimatize from for everything else, I think, and that helps us.

SFBG: You mentioned working with several unknown actors, several of whom are children. What are the different approaches to working with younger, less experienced actors, especially when they're doing some very serious scenes?

DB: Well, you have to respect them and tell them what the scene is, so they know what's going on. And they're good actors — you pick good actors — they're able to do it. The problem with little kids is they get tired. When they can't focus, you can't create focus. They just can't focus; that's it. It's gone. They're too tired, and they can't understand why you want to do it again: "We've just done it. Why do you want to do it again?" And you've just gotta send them home and bring them back the next day and hope you can do it again. The middle-aged [young] ones, there's a scene where obviously [the character] Salim takes [the character Latika] and clearly takes her virginity. And that's a big thing in India, especially for teenagers, discussing that. But, you know, you're honest and you don't hide things from them. You deal with respectfully and openly about stuff, and I think they enjoy doing it. You involve their parents in it so they all know what's going on and there's nothing secret being kept from people.

L-R: Dev Patel and Freida Pinto. by Ishika Mohan

And then you just hope that your energy and your love of the story or the situation will inspire them to do it likewise. And you want feedback from them as well, which you can get, saying "I'd never do that; I'd do this." So you learn off people as well. You've got to stay open to it. You can't go there thinking, I'm going to teach these people how to act, or anything like that. It's like, you're going to learn about different skills in acting from working with them, which I did. I found them — and they should be as well; they make a lot of movies — so they really know how to do it. And they love Bollywood movies, obviously, and they make them, but they also love Western movies. They have one eye on Western movies, quite big ones usually, the bigger ones. But they do love Western acting as well; they respect it, because they realize it's a bit more subtle than their type of acting, and they respect it. They kind of look up to the big titans, to Al Pacino and Paul Newman, as was, and Robert De Niro. They know all about them, and they've got their eye on them.

SFBG: Returning to some of the difficult scenes. How true to life are these moments, like the blinding, of violence inflicted on street children?

DB: Well, if you go, you very quickly will get somebody coming up to your car at a traffic light, and somebody will knock on your window and you can see clearly that their hands have been cut off, both hands have been cut off, at some point in their life. They've been cauterized and everything, and they've done that to make them better beggars. And you have to get your head around that. It's appalling and it's like an earthquake in your mind, morally, but it's of no value to that person or to you, really. If you want it to be a value, then you leave and you take away your shock with you, but otherwise you have to kind of accept it, like that person has done, and decide whether you're gonna give them money or not.

And everybody tells you don't give them money, because money they will just give to gangsters who run the street corners. And so you're just funding gangsters, so what are you gonna do, and so you say, you'll take around food, because the food the gangsters probably won't want. And you have to see it from their perspective. India is really interesting, because those who are successful have a greater sense of the complete opposite, of those whose fate is very poor, as we'd see it. And there is a respect there that we lack, certainly, that we don't have in that way. Maybe [San Francisco] respects its homeless more than a lot of towns, but there they do respect them, and they realize how blessed they are by their fortune. And the person whose hands have been cut off regards their fate as being something that they accept, that that is what life has given them. So you can't impose a morality on it. It's pitiful, that morality, and it doesn't get you anywhere, really. So, yes, it does happen, clearly.

SFBG: On a much lighter note: other than universalizing it, what do you think the game show aspect brings to the film?

DB: It's funny, isn't it? It's like a garden weed, [Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?]. It'll take over, if you let it, 'cause it's got this hypnotic quality, the music and stuff like that, and that's why it's such a success. It's like a drug. It gets into your blood stream and you can't stop watching it, and it gives you a kind of short-term pleasure. But it wastes your time, kind of like a cheap magazine takes your time away. I suppose what it does is it's a good shorthand to allow people access to what is apparently a strange culture. It's also got an idea in it about the new India and the way the West is exported, this capitalist idea which now India is chasing, along with the other tiger economies. And it is the definition of capitalism, isn't it? The problem we've got at the moment is that capitalism has to expand. If it contracts, it's in crisis, which we are now suddenly in a period of contraction, and that's a massive crisis. It's never in crisis if it's expanding.

And that show is an expansive show — you make more and more money, and it grows and grows and grows, like that. And if that's what we've exported, that's why India's got it, that's why China's got it. It defines a type of economy. So it stands for that, really, and then when you see [the character Jamal] looking at the new buildings and stuff like that, it fits in with that, which is that, the world has decided — I mean, even China is capitalist now; it's an authoritarian capitalism, but it's capitalist, really. Russia's gone that way. No wonder that program is exported everywhere now, including Afghanistan. That makes sense, doesn't it? It would be there as well. What you have to be careful with, in story terms, is you have to stop it taking over, which is a balancing act. We had to make sure you didn't feel like you were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? all the time. We had to cut it back and control it, really, because it just seeps everywhere. You can't stop it. It's weird. I remember the first cut, which was like three hours, it was just the fucking show. It was like, oh my God, I'm fucking watching all this, so you hack it back and get it out of the way. It's just a tool to help you get to the people, and that's all.

Slumdog Millionaire opens today in Bay Area theaters.