Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/569837
34 dga quarterly way that Ridley Scott had done it—just old-style physical acting and effects—and CG. And I felt I was not the guy to negotiate that transition. Maybe looking back, I could have probably said, 'No, we're going to do it in the way that Ridley did,' but the industry as a whole was in transi- tion, and CG was inevitable. It made sense. So I decided to do A Life Less Ordinary (1997) instead. Which was a disaster, commercially. That was a salutary experience. Q: You did eventually get a Hollywood project off the ground, The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. That was on a whole different scale than the relatively small British films you'd done. A: It's simple really, if you're going to take $50 million from somebody, they want certain things in return. But they didn't put us under any extra pressure, and in fact, Leo protected us from the kind of natural pressure that a lot of directors feel when they take that amount of mon- ey. It was also a time that, if you made a film abroad, it was expected you would take a huge crew. And we did take a huge crew. And you do behave imperially. There is no way you cannot do that. You arrive in a foreign country with your per diems, and you go: We're going to do this. It's not for political reasons, it's just the film- making reasons. I say that because when we were setting up Slumdog, we decided to do the exact opposite and to take hardly anybody. We took a huge crew to Thai- land for The Beach, and when you take a huge crew, you've set in motion what the film is going to be. I'm not saying this applies to everyone, but this is the lesson I learned, and why I think Slumdog was the film it was and The Beach was the film it was. I learned from doing The Beach that, in this day and age, if you want to try and capture something about a place, you have to be flex- ible. Not necessarily indigenous, but you have to simply use local knowledge and local crew, and trust local crew as well. Not just as a minor element, as the key elements of the show. We did that in Slumdog and it was a hugely profitable experience. Whereas Thailand, which is a wonderful place, I couldn't wait to leave. Q: So the way you shot Slumdog was a reaction against the way you had made The Beach? A: Yeah. It affects everything if you can make the film for $15 million. So we were very clear that we were go- ing to strip it down. It's so obvious, I know, but you then come up against this: When you get to India, what you discover is that although you can cast kids in their early teens who speak English very well, very few 6- or 7-year- old kids speak English. So you immediately decide: we'll do the first third of the film in Hindi. That's a cor- rect decision artistically, and it bears a lot of fruit all the way through [production]. You don't have the pressure of people saying: Listen, mate, you've taken $40 million, PHOTO: FOX SEARCHLIGHT/PHOTOFEST "I really like to do something different each time. If I have some hesitancy about how in hell am I going to do something, that makes me vulnerable and I think more interesting in my approach to it."