Video interview: Simon Beaufoy

The movie Slumdog Millionaire is just now going wide in its theatrical release and it's one of the handful of must-see films on my list. Its screenwriter is Simon Beaufoy who has numerous writing credits including The Full Monty (1997). In November, this article on Beaufoy came out in which he described some of the narrative choices he had to make in adapting the book for Slumdog into the movie:

In writing the screenplay, Beaufoy said he was keenly aware of being a Brit writing a screenplay about characters who live in the slums of India, and he felt he had to be authentic for them. "It's more important to be true to the place than to be true to the book -- and I don't mean that as disrespectful to the author, but as an outsider going in, you have to be true to that," says Boyle. "The authenticity is very important, especially if you're making a film in a different culture, a different place."

And so Beaufoy set out to give his hero a heroine to love and to pine for, which gave him the means to build a scaffolding of classical-hero narrative structure over the foundation of the game show story. Once he determined that the love story would become the central thread, he had to go back to the source and decide what from the original story would fit in with the romance angle, and what had to go. And he knew that the tone of the film was crucial: this would be a melodramatic film, with moments of comedy and mirth interwoven with brutal violence, scenes of crushing poverty and torture. "Indian cinema isn't concerned with being authentic as a rule. That's a broad generalization, but it's largely true," Beaufoy says. "In England, you couldn't get away with with torture and comedy in the same movie, but here you could."

Now our hero had a name -- Jamal -- and a heroine, but she needed to be put in danger, and Beaufoy needed some bad guys to keep the star-crossed lovers apart. He molded one bad guy out of the main character's best friend in the book, Salim, turning the friend into our hero's brother -- a brother with street smarts and survival skills, but lacking the moral compass that guides Jamal. For another he took a character from the book who preys upon street children, taking them to his "orphanage" where he has them blinded or crippled so they will earn more money begging in the streets.

We can add this video interview below to gain further insight into the creative process in writing the screenplay for one of this year's most notable movies Slumdog Millionaire.