Slumdog Millionaire

Freida Pinto as Latika
Released: November 12, 2008 (limited)

Directed by: Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan (co-director: India)
Written by: Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) and Vikas Swarup (novel)
Genre: Drama

Cast

Dev Patel … Jamal Malik
Freida Pinto … Latika
Madhur Mittal … Salim Malik
Anil Kapoor … Prem Kumar
Irrfan Khan … Police Inspector

Jamal Malik, a penniless eighteen year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, is one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” But when the show breaks for the night, suddenly, he is arrested on suspicion of cheating. After all, how could an uneducated street kid possibly know so much? Determined to get to the bottom of Jamal’s story, the jaded Police Inspector spends the night probing Jamal’s incredible past, from his riveting tales of the slums where he and his brother Salim survived by their wits to his hair-raising encounters with local gangs to his heartbreak over Latika, the unforgettable girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of Jamal’s increasingly layered story reveals where he learned the answers to the show’s seemingly impossible quizzes. But one question remains a mystery: what is this young man with no apparent desire for riches really doing on the game show? When the new day dawns and Jamal returns to answer the final question, the Inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out…

Photo Gallery

Trivia and Fun Facts

• Director Danny Boyle placed the money to be paid to the 3 lead child actors in a trust that is to be released to them upon their completion of grade school at 16 years of age. The production company has set up for an auto-rikshaw driver to take the kids to school everyday until they are 16 years old.
• After failing to find a suitable actor in India, Dev Patel was cast as the lead role, Jamal, after Danny Boyle’s daughter first saw him on the English TV show Skins and urged her father to take a look.

Movie Quotes

Latika: You’re a sweet boy, Jamal.

Latika: You want to do something for me?
Jamal Malik: Anything.
Latika: Then forget me!

Jamal Malik: I knew you’d be watching
Latika: I thought we would meet only in death.
Jamal Malik: This is our destiny
Latika: Kiss me

Freida Quotes

On co-star Dev Patel
“I knew he had done a successful TV show in London. I thought he would be a hoity-toity boy, but he was so down to earth. He was the only British boy in the film, and he was nervous. It humbled him. Getting along with him was the easiest thing to do. We hung out a lot, and I showed him around. It helped when we did some of the more intense scenes.”

On director Danny Boyle
“Danny is a very encouraging man. He lets you do what you want. He has no rules for a particular scene. He lets you emote the way you want. He would tell us where we would go wrong and motivate us to do better.”

On the younger actors
“I read the script first and I read little Latika’s part. I was like, ‘That’s the character. That’s the Latika that I can relate to because she’s a spicy, stubborn girl. She’s got this zest for life and she’s playful.’ She’s a fighter and the moment you come to the girl in the middle, she automatically gets submissive and she’s kind of grown before her time. She’s 14 but she looks like she could be 18, 20. So it was really important to watch the kids to see how they had grown so I could grow beyond that as well. So Danny had already shot scenes with the two characters and I watched it and it was such an immense amount of pressure because they were so good. They just seemed so effortless. It just makes it kind of simpler to have watched it, so the growth seems not disconnected. It just seems fluid.”