Film Education Slumdog Millionaire Unit

2. What is film?
The following definition is provided in a teaching unit for schools:
A film is a series of photographs which are put together so they:
create an image of a world that already exists
create a new world
tell a story.
Locate another definition from another source.
Compare the two definitions. Make up a definition of your own that is both accurate and easy
to understand. Think of the films you have viewed and check if the definition fits your
understanding.
A film is ___________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Test your definition, using three films you know.

3. Why do people watch films?
Every year millions of people all over the world watch films at the cinema or on television
screens in their own homes. Most popular films are produced to entertain and allow
audiences to relax and escape from the pressures of everyday life. However, films can also be
important sources of education and information.
Filmmaking is a form of artistic expression, like writing or painting. But instead of words or
paint, the camera is the means used to express the filmmaker’s outlook on life. Camera
angles catch and emphasise important dramatic scenes. Action is often a more important
means of revealing character on the screen than words.
The first films were made in the late nineteenth century. Since then, there have been rapid
developments in the scope and sophistication of their settings, plots and characterisation.
Today, film production is a multi-million dollar industry. Most films need special effects
equipment, many cameras, elaborate sets and hundreds of technical employees to back up
actors. The huge cost of making a film means that nearly all films must attempt to appeal to
a wide public to be successful.

5. Film Terminology – mix and match
Use the internet to find and match the terms with the definitions;
Match the definitions below with the correct terms from the box

16. 1) In the B roll footage we see camera operators on skateboards filming some of the
street scenes. What is the relationship between the technology, and the challenges
presented by Mumbai as a location?
Danny: Well the restrictions to do with Mumbai are really to do with how busy it is with people. There’s
twenty million people living in quite a small place and that is a lot of people. But also the way that they
accommodate so many people in such a small city, because geographically it is quite small, is a lot of people.
Half of those people live in slums and the slum areas are actually very narrow and very densely populated and
very ‘higgledy piggledy’. So we tried to…we initially set out with a film camera shooting there but it wasn’t
right really. It was too inflexible really. They’re quite big there, the cameras that you hire and they also come
with a lot of baggage, in the sense that they come with a lot of crew attached to them. So, for instance,
there’s no insurance on film cameras that you get. You can’t insure a film camera which can be worth £50,000.
You can’t insure it, so what they do is they send three boys with it, who are just three young men – teenagers
- who just sleep with the camera in shifts, literally chained to the camera so if anybody tries to steal it, they’ll
have to steal this kid as well. So you get this whole baggage with it plus the fact that people love the movies
there and when they see a big film camera they think there’s going to be a big Bollywood star and a kind of
hysteria of love begins, which is no help to you making a film. So what we did is, we used these digital
cameras which have a big…they’re much more flexible for use in small spaces. So, for instance, chasing
through the slums and things like that, people don’t quite know what’s going on because they don’t look like
cameras. So they think, well it’s not proper filming anyway, there are no big stars around so they leave you
alone and get on with their lives because it’s a very busy place Mumbai. Everybody has got a lot to do all the
time but will stop for a major Bollywood film star, but for a small digital camera, no they’ve got more
important things to be getting on with so that played into our hands and allowed us to film there a lot more
successfully. Then you use whatever you can to move these digital cameras. You put the cameraman on roller-
skates, skateboards, in a car, on the back of a bicycle, anything really. It had a little stabiliser on it so you can
actually go pretty much anywhere with it really and use anything to get you from one place to another. There
was one sequence where they jump off a building. They just jump off the tops of one of the slums and we had
them all falling onto cardboard boxes, but the kids jumped off which they thought was great fun, jumping up
into the cardboard boxes like old-fashioned stunt men but the cameraman jumps off as well at the same time,
pointing the camera at them. So they’re all up in the air at the same time and you just cut out the bit where
they hit the boxes but the cameras are really flexible, you can do that, you know.

18. 2) There seems to be a real sense of improvisation and fluidity in the filming. How
does this compare to the filming of The Beach? Does a smaller budget require
greater inventiveness?
Yes, I mean I made a film, The Beach which had a very big budget and I learnt from it that that was not the
way to make that kind of film and I think it’s more out-moded way of filming and by that I mean that you
take, to a foreign country. You take an enormous amount of western crew, and we took hundreds of people
there with us and you can’t help but behave like an invading army because you can have all the good
intentions in the world and be as politically correct as you want to be but basically there’s hundreds of
people arrive with podiums and a kind of attitude of ‘right, where we going to do this then’ and you literally
flatten everything around you. So on this one, in the end, we decided not to. I took in the end ten crew
altogether that we used. It’s a lot easier to do in Mumbai because it’s the home of Bollywood, so there’s
lots of Bollywood film crews so we decided to film it with film crews from the local area. They were hugely
important to us. For instance, for us to get permission to film in the slums, which is what we did and we had
a wonderful time filming there, you need to show that it’s local people making the film, not just westerners
coming in. There were some westerners, me and the cameraman but mostly the rest of the crew and
certainly all the cast were from there, you know, with the exception of Dev Patel. That helps. That creates a
lot more good will than the invading army type of thing, which is useful for a local economy because an
invading army comes in with lots of cash which the local economy want it to spend. But you never really win
over hearts; you just win over their pockets. So it was important for us with this film, which is a more
emotional film really and a film based on the life of a kid growing up there that it felt more subjective. That
it was made from inside the community, I suppose.

20. 3) Jamal, like Renton in Trainspotting is a character who has very definitely ‘chosen life’. What
drew you to these characters, and what are the similarities and differences in your approach
to them?
I think there are some similarities with Trainspotting. There is a kind of energy in the film which I certainly found in Ervine
Welsh’s book, Trainspotting that we tried to convey into the film and there’s an energy in Mumbai the city which is
remarkably similar with its life affirming energy which is despite a lot of crap and a lot of difficulties, a lot of problems,
peoples’ life spirit is affirmed and the way he does it in the book. Trainspotting is through humour, absolutely
unacceptable humour, you know which is the way that the blacker things get, the darker the sense of humour gets and
the more life-affirming it is. And you get that in Mumbai as well, it’s not so much in the sense of humour, it’s just the
sense of energy and movement and dynamism in the city of actually not being…people regard it as poverty, you know
being in slums but it’s…and they regard poverty as being abject, they don’t there, it’s a shockingly inappropriate word for
it. Actually everybody is very very busy and it’s a business city on all its different levels of wealth and poverty. Everybody
is out to try to make a bit of money and everybody is trying to get their kids in schools and things like that, so it feels like
a bustling, dynamic city. So I think in that way it resembles Trainspotting. I think the characters in Trainspotting are
characters that have chosen, when confronted with problems to swim not sink and that’s the key. So there’s a lot of
thieving going on in both films and obviously we’re not meant to approve of thieving but in cinematic terms you do
celebrate it in a way because it’s the way in which a character actually says, I’m going to do something that will help me
survive. And in this particular case it’s nicking off tourists in Mumbai. You know it’s actually swindling a few tourists out of
a bob or two, but it’s the way in which a character actually affirms how important life is to him, I guess. There are some
other similarities. There’s a famous scene in Trainspotting where he disappears down a toilet and alarmingly there’s a
scene in this film where the main character, when he’s a bit younger disappears down a toilet as well with slightly
different results in the end. I was alarmed when we were filming those sequences, I thought, it’s the same scene, what
are we doing? I thought we’d done this scene already. But there is something interesting about British film directors, how
they’re obsessed with toilets. If you go and see a British film, there’s usually a scene in a toilet, when you go and see
other cultures’ films there’s never scenes in toilets, or very rarely, but in our films there’s always one or two you know
and there’s two in ours. Two really crucial scenes take place in toilets, and very different kinds of toilets. But toilets none
the less.

22. 4) British audiences will be familiar with Dev Patel from Skins. There are other moments
in the film that speak very directly to the British/Indian relationship, (the call centre,
EastEnders reference etc.). How easy was it to draw on these shared cultural
experiences? Do you think British audiences will connect easily to the world inhabited by
Jamal?
Yes I always assumed that the film would work in Britain much better than say it would in America. Now, it’s been
released in America first and is working really well there, which astonished me because I always thought they’ll
never get it in America because they won’t understand about EastEnders or they won’t understand about Dev
Patel from Skins, and things like that. But actually they love it for different reasons I think, it’s more for them, it’s
more like the Rocky story. It’s about a kid who has nothing, you know, but a dream, and he will get that dream. And
the success in the end is not about money, it’s actually about a girl and that’s the kind of Rocky story really you
know and they love that story being retold in America. It’s about the optimism they value as part of the Psyche of
the Nation really. We’re a bit more bitter and cynical in Britain, so you come at it in a slightly different way. Well I
think you will, I don’t know. It hasn’t been released here yet, but I hope people will find access to the film. We have
a much more visible Indian population here and I’m very proud to live in the East End of London. It’s a 60% Bengali
area you know, and people like Dev from Skins, he’s a London lad, who people will recognise and love from Skins.
They love his character from Skins and I hope they’ll be able to make the journey to this film with him. And yes,
there are other references which pass Americans by, like the reference to EastEnders. We changed one reference
actually because at one point in the call centre he said, he claimed to this woman that he lived right next-door to
Detective Taggart’s flat but we had to change that because, of course, in America they just go, Detective Taggart?
So we changed that to Sean Connery’s flat which is actually a better line. That he lives right next door to Sean
Connery’s flat, claiming that he comes from Scotland like she does. But yeah, I hope it’s a film that can be
celebrated across a number of communities in Britain and certainly we’re doing a screening. We’ve done a couple
of Hindi screenings already with Hindi audiences because there’s a huge audience here that goes to the Bollywood
films which is a kind of secret audience. Every Bollywood film that’s released each week, there’s one each week
that’s in the top ten in the U.K. usually, or hovering near there. And that’s a huge audience that we hope the film
will appeal to as well.