QUIZ TIME: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor on the sets of Slumdog Millionaire; director Danny Boyle (below)

Anil Kapoor was nervous about his first English film. “He kept saying, don’t be frightened to tell me to tone it down,” remembers director Danny Boyle. “But I like big performances. I like it full on.”

Boyle also gives it full on in his new and critically acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire. It’s loosely based on Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A — a rags-to-rupees plot about a slum kid rising to the top of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) and then being accused of cheating. The film hurtles back and forth through time, like a jam-packed Mumbai local train, stuffed with everything you can imagine — hookers, pimps, mafia dons, Hindu-Muslim riots, orphans, maimed beggars, open latrines, the Taj Mahal and a big dance number at Victoria Terminus station.

It’s Bollywood meeting Dickens in Maximum City. “You can call it melodramatic but we respond to that on a human level,” says Boyle. “It’s no coincidence that Dickens’s work came out of that Victorian explosion of opportunity and wealth creation. Suddenly a mass of poor people had a little bit of purchasing power. And they wanted to be entertained. Dickens provided that. And Bollywood does too.”

He got more excitement than he could dream of. Boyle had not been to India before. His father had been stationed in Mumbai during World War II, living in the Salvation Army hostel. Boyle never imagined he’d end up shooting a film in India — and its largest slum.

“The first day Danny said we were going to Dharavi I was getting ready for the worst emotional experience of my life,” says Dev Patel, a British actor whose family is from Nairobi and who plays Jamal, the slumdog millionaire. Patel was thinking of malnourished kids and beggars with stumps for hands. Instead, he says, what he found was “a sense of community, hustle and bustle.”

Boyle says he didn’t want to make what’s been called “poverty porn”— a sort of National Geographic tourist special on poverty. “It’s not a pitiful film,” says Boyle. “Sure there’s not enough water or sanitation or electricity. But in India a slum is a geographic reference more than a value judgment.” He shakes his head in wonder. “Dharavi is amazing. It’s self-reliant, self-sufficient. And powerful. Politicians arrange to have private ambulances waiting at the edges of the slum for and when people need to go to the hospital.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s a candy coated vision of slum life. There’s even a gag-inducing scene where young Jamal plunges into a pit of human faeces. “It was a huge tub of chocolate and peanut butter,” says Boyle with a grin. “It was actually quite delicious!”

The real problem, Boyle discovered, was getting Bollywood to show up. He tried to get Shah Rukh Khan to play the show host. “It became clear I was never going to get an answer out of him,” says Boyle. “They are impossibly busy. They are not just doing movies. They are sponsoring everything from whisky to toothpaste to skin bleach.” But then he saw Anil Kapoor in Taal. “It was an amazing performance — really extreme caricature but vivid,” says Boyle, whose other Hindi film favorites include Ram Balram, Satya and, “among straight films,” Black Friday.

There was an added bonus to having a real star as the host of his fake TV show. “The crowd (of extras) was eating out of his hands,” says Boyle. “At the end of an exhausting day, he would say: one more round of applause. And he’d get it.”

Kapoor, clearly, added a bit of glamour to the shoot. “My mom is a huge fan of his,” says Patel. “She was there for the shoot and I was afraid she’d embarrass me!”

But the real stars of the film are not of the Bollywood variety, but the children, some of whom actually grew up in slums. “They were fantastic,” says Boyle. He quickly realised that children who had “lived by their wits on the streets” had a kind of smartness that “nice middle class kids who knew a bit of English” just didn’t have. But casting them meant the film couldn’t really be in English. Boyle called the studio. “They were horrified when I said the beginning would have to be in Hindi,” chuckles Boyle. “But I promised the subtitles would make it even more exciting.”

But the shooting, he admits, was no cakewalk. Boyle’s known for his gritty urban films such as Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. But India, he says, was something else. One day he came to shoot at a location they’d scouted out the day before. But somehow overnight someone had built a wall across it. “A 100 meter wall, 8 feet high, to keep the beggars out,” says Boyle. “And you think what’s going on? How did we not know about it? But you have to go OK, there’s a wall. You can’t start shouting and screaming. You can’t control it. But there is a pattern and if you trust it you will eventually benefit from it.”

Even when he had the location ready, he had to make sure his stars showed up. “They are all doing half a dozen movies,” says Boyle. He would remind Irrfan Khan (who plays a cop who interrogates the slumboy) that their big scene was on Tuesday. “And he’d say I can’t come on Tuesday, how about Friday between 2 and 6.” Boyle stops, grins, runs his hands through his hair and then says, “But it all works out. We’d have an assistant director with six mobiles and he’d be ringing the first assistant directors of half a dozen films Irrfan was working on. And they’d do a deal and finally Irrfan would be there and your scene would be done.”

But the film, which is already getting the Oscar buzz, won’t really be “done” for a few years more. That’s when the real-life slum children turn 16. Boyle got them enrolled into school. When they graduate, there’s a tidy sum of money waiting for them, says Boyle. “Let’s hope the film will benefit them as well,” he says. And that’s his final answer. As Bachchan would say on KBC, issey lock kiya jaye.