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

Quotes

“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.” (Freida Pinto on co-star Dev Patel)

“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.” (Freida Pinto on director Danny Boyle)

“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.” (Freida Pinto on the younger actors)

“My agent said ‘I think you should go for it since you are very interested in acting.’ So I went and met her at her office and the first thing I thought was, she’s really warm, really nice and she said, ‘It’s a Danny Boyle film!’ and I was like, ‘… Trainspotting!’ I knew Trainspotting really well because when I was in college we had a film appreciation course and we had Trainspotting as one of the films. I really liked it.” (Freida Pinto on auditioning for the role of Latika)

“It was a rollercoaster ride to be honest because the first month after the audition with Loveleen, Danny came down for the test. I was really nervous because I had never met a director close up in person before. By the fourth month I thought, this wasn’t working, the reason why they keep calling me back was because they think I’m not good enough and they’re giving me another chance and that’s it. The fifth audition and I’m out of this. So by the sixth audition I was almost in tears. But after the sixth month, when my agent called and said, ‘You’re on girl!’ I was ecstatic, I just couldn’t believe it until I actually went and signed my contract.” (Freida Pinto on recieving the role of Latika)

“Danny wanted me to explore the character as much as I could. Loud facial expressions really don’t do much for an actor. Internalisation is something that Danny really taught me.” (Freida Pinto on Danny Boyle’s direction for the role)

“These goons kept dragging me into the car and I’m screaming, ‘Jamal, Jamal!’ literally asking people to help me and nobody really does and then they finally put me into the car and I come back to the next shot again. This guy came up to me and said, ‘Are you okay? Do you need any help?’ and I just looked at him and said, ‘We’re shooting’. He said, ‘You scared the life out of me, you know.’ I was really happy because it was convincing.” (Freida Pinto on when a passer-by mistook her for someone in distress)

“Freida Pinto has got that extraordinary beauty alongside a strong sense of sadness about her, which we needed very much for her part in the film.” (Simon Beaufoy on casting Freida Pinto as Latika)