December 21, 2008
The feature film Slumdog Millionaire from director Danny Boyle and director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle — which received four Golden Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture and Best Director-Motion Picture — was shot in large part with a P+S Technik SI-2K Mini Camera Head and recorded on a ruggedized notebook recording unit. Though the production team planned to shoot primarily on 35mm film and use the SI-2K only for scenes that take place in the Mumbai slums, more than half of the film was shot with the SI-2K in the end.
The story of Slumdog Millionaire unfolds in Mumbai (Bombay), one of the densest, wildest, fastest moving cities in the world, a symbol of the vastly diverse megalopolises of the future in which the fates of rich and poor will be closely intertwined. Though it features luxury shopping, sun-soaked beaches and hip nightlife, it is also a city where as many of 50 percent of the citizens live in shantytowns, ghettoes or on the streets.
Shooting in the slums of Mumbai called for a clandestine capture system.
Mumbai's high-contrast mix of heartbreaking poverty and technological advancement especially fascinated Boyle. "I've been to slums before but in different places in the world, but this was different in all its contradictions. There's this smell you get first of all... this incredible mixture of excrement and then saffron, a mixture of the sweet and the sour," he laughs. "India's one of the world's leading nuclear powers on the one hand, but on the other hand, there are no public toilets."
The task of shooting amidst the bustle of these ramshackle cities-within-the-city fell to cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle, with whom he had previously worked on the digitally shot horror hit 28 Days Later
. The crew originally planned to shoot certain scenes using SI-2K digital cameras and shoot the rest of the movie on film, but Boyle was adamant that he did not want to take large, cumbersome 35mm cameras into the slums. The smaller, more flexible digital cameras enabled them to shoot quickly with much less disturbance to the local communities.
For Boyle, it came down to trial and error to find the right shooting process. "We started off using classical kinds of film cameras and I didn't like it. I wanted to feel really involved in the city. I didn't want to be looking at it, examining it," he explains. "I wanted to be thrown right into the chaos as much as possible. There's a period of time between about 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. where it all stops and just the dogs move around, but other than that, the place is just a tide of humanity."
"Anthony was able to hand-hold the SI-2Ks," recalls Boyle. "Although they had a gyro on them to stabilize them, they were still very small and could operate in very small, narrow areas, which is what you get in the slums. You can capture a bit of the life that's going on around you without people realizing it and becoming self-conscious."
Boyle continues: "We also used what we called a 'CanonCam,' which was a Canon stills camera, which takes 12 frames a second. If people see a still camera, they don't think it is recording live action. We'd record stuff like that, as well as occasionally using the traditional film camera — so it's a mixture of different technologies that we used in the film. Whoever was operating the camera would have a hard drive strapped to their back, which would record the images while the camera was in their hand. Anthony would look like a rather cumbersome tourist from Denmark who was wandering around the slums," laughs Boyle, "but, actually, what he was doing was filming."
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