Originally posted on the Filmmaker blog, here's Graham Flashner's coverage of the Austin Film Festival.


posted 10/21/08

It's not often that a movie receives a standing ovation at the end of a film festival screening. The only time I saw it happen was at Cannes for Haskell Wexler's Latino, a film with anti-American sentiments. But Danny Boyle's exuberant Slumdog Millionaire received a similarly rapturous greeting after its Austin premiere.

It's a feel-great story about Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan from the streets of Mumbai who's one question away from winning the 20 million rupee jackpot on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and is arrested by police on suspicion that he must be cheating. The quiz show proves to be a framing device for Jamal to flash back on the events that shaped his life - events that enable him to answer the game show questions. At the heart of the movie is Jamal's attempts to reconnect with the love of his life, Latika, who he was separated from as a child. The power of love to transcend a life of struggle and hardship is one of the film's most resonant themes.

Written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), the film won the Audience Award at the Toronto Fim Festival, and has been generating steady buzz ever since, as it winds its way to its Nov. 28 U.S. release. Most everyone I spoke with the following day had the dazed look of people still caught up in a magical experience, the kind only a great film can deliver.

Boyle was a busy man at Austin, honored with the Extraordinary Contribution To Film Award and rushing from one luncheon to the next. I managed to catch up with him for a few minutes between engagements. In person, he's friendly, unassuming, and bursting with the kind of hyper-kinetic energy that defines his visual style.

Filmmaker Magazine: Watching the film, it's like we're plunged into the streets of Mumbai with these kids. How did you capture the action so vividly?

Danny Boyle: I try to make films with subjective POVS that make you fel like you're caught up in the action. You have no choice but to experience the film. For Slumdog, we used a silicon imaging prototype camera, 512K, which was strapped to a recorder on the cameraman's back. The recorder connects to a camera lens work on the hand, which allowed us to create an extra dynamism and flexibility, more than you'd get in a Steadicam shot.

Filmmaker: How did you get attached to the material? Had you read the novel (by Indian writer Vikas Swaroop) ?

Boyle: I read the novel out of respect for the writer. I didn't really want to do a film about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But once I read the first ten pages of the script, I was hooked.

Filmmaker: What attracted you to the material?

Boyle: It was just so fresh, and it was a classic underdog story. And it was set in an India in transition. India is a tiger economy. For filmmaking, Mumbai is the future - HBO's been here, Spielberg was here. Capitalism has to keep expanding.

Filmmaker: Commercially, were you concerned to make a film with an all-Indian cast?

Boyle: You couldn't make it with any other type of cast; there was no choice. Call it arrogance, or a temporary feeling of infallibility, but I since I loved it, so I felt everybody would love it. The people who turned it down, I'd look at them like, 'are you fucking nuts'?

Filmmaker: How was it working with the children of Mumbai?

Boyle: The sript was written in English, but when we got to India, we discovered that seven-year-old Hindi children aren't old enough to grasp English, so we switched the script into Hindi. I had to call the financiers and tell them the first third of the script would be in Hindi with subtitles. They thought I had gone mad, that I was going to come back with some meditation movie on India.

Filmmaker: But it worked. You get this rare look inside an exotic culture that most of us never get to see.

Boyle: In a strange way, it makes the film more acessible, because it's more believable.

Filmmaker: The film got a standing ovation. When you came onstage after the film for the Q&A, the audience was still standing. What does that feel like?

Boyle: It was fantastic, of course, but truthfully all I could think of was what's wrong; how could I have improved it? You're always expecting people to say 'what was that'? when the film is done. Must be that British pessimism.


posted 10/19/08
No film festival celebrates the screenwriter quite like Austin's. Yesterday, I spent the morning in a ballroom at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, listening to screenwriting powerhouses John August and John Lee Hancock discuss the merits of what makes good dialogue. By the afternoon, I was in a chair-less room at the Victorian Balcony, joining 30 writers sprawled on the carpet, worshipping almost literally at the feet of Lawrence Kasdan, himself reclining on the floor with a microphone. Friday morning, I sat in on intimate roundtable discussions with development execs and producers who rotated tables, speed-dating style, and answered questions from a rapt audience of aspiring scribes, most of whom sported badges denoting their status in the screenplay and teleplay competitions (Second Rounder! Semi-Finalist!) and who seemed giddy at such unfettered access to Hollywood's gatekeepers, many of whom parted unhesitatingly with email addresses and business cards. As one writer told me, "They tend to weed out the panelists who don't provide access."


Unlike the majority of film festivals, where you're lucky to get a ten-minute glimpse of talent at a post-screening Q&A, intimate contact with producers, writers, and showrunners is what the AFF is all about. The film program isn't too shabby either - 67 features and 49 shorts in competition, and prestige titles like W, Slumdog Millionaire, and Synecdoche, New York, with Oscar aspirations. Only last year, Jason Reitman took home the Audience Award for Juno. But for at least the first four days here, the films seem almost incidental. For anyone with a script or idea to pitch, AFF's raison d'etre is the Conference, four days of intensive screenwriting boot camp, pitch fests, and networking opportunities.

Most of the action takes place at the stately, 122 year-old Driskill Hotel. This weekend, even the rabid Texas football fans, in town to see their Longhorns annihilate Missouri, took a back seat to the throngs of writer, producer, and actor wannabes roaming the halls and lining up for panels. In one room, Shane Black regaled an intimate gathering of devotees with war stories from the Hollywood front. In the cavernous Driskill Ballroom, writers could participate in Q&A's with A-listers like Jeff Nathanson and Boaz Yakin, and take part in discussions with such titles as, "What Gets Producers Excited" and "Building A Script".

Of course, these types of seminars-with-the-stars are packaged in Hollywood with mind-numbing regularity. In Austin, however, the panelists don't get to jump into their Priuses and their Beamers and cruise on home, leaving the unwashed masses in the dust. And they can't hit the slopes, as they might if this were Sundance. Here, with everyone on the same party circuit, they're remarkably accessible, so a writer who spontaneously pitched a romantic comedy with aliens to a development exec might well see that same exec at a barbecue or screening later in the day. At the roundtables, it was not unusual to hear execs inviting writers to "stalk me later" if they wanted a follow-up.

Most importantly, as several writers have already confided, there's an esprit de corps among the writers that isn't always found in L.A. Everyone's competing, but everyone seems to be pulling for each other as well. And while there've been a few grumblings about stand-offish buyers and agents not taking on new clients ("What are they doing here?" said one writer), the prevailing sentiment here is that the buyers are sincere about finding new talent. For at least this weekend, the dreams of hundreds of aspiring screenwriters felt just a bit closer to being realized. If the film and TV execs who held court in Austin were only here to hand out false hope, then it was a performance in the best tradition of the illusions that define Hollywood.

Film Report: What happened to Oliver Stone? I went to see W, the Festival's opening night premiere, hoping to see the same edgy paranoid conspiracy theories that made JFK and Nixon so riveting. Instead, I got a plodding two hour-plus film that was less revelatory than your average TV movie - and about as interesting. Where were the subversive leaps of logic, the twisted POVs? Josh Brolin (pictured at left) does a fine job of humanizing Dubyuh, and James Cromwell is stellar as Bush 41, but it's as if Stone made the film under sedation, or with a gun held to his head by Dick Cheney. I am not a political junkie by any means, and I know the same facts that anyone who reads the New York Times or watches CNN knows. So if someone like me can watch a film on Bush and feel like I've learned nothing new, that's a bad sign.

A more apt title for Mark Wahlberg's silly new action thriller, Max Payne (pictured at right) would be Max Payneful. An endless collage of bullets exploding in slow motion, rising body counts, and unintentionally funny set pieces, it's the latest in a line of video games brought to cinematic life. I loved Wahlberg in films like The Shooter and Invincible, where he played blue-collar Everymen. Here, as a moping cop hellbent on revenging the death of his wife and daughter, he grimaces and sulks his way through the movie, like an actor hellbent on finding which producer got him into this mess.

Graham Flashner is a screenwriter, producer and journalist whose work has appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Variety, Fandango.com, and others.

Labels: Festival Ambassador

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 10/31/2008 04:18:00 PM

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