Filmmaker Danny Boyle has been out doing the publicity rounds with 28 Years Later opening in cinemas right now. During an interview with The Guardian (who else!) talk turned to his big-hitting, multi-award-winning Slumdog Millionaire.
The movie made nearly $400 million worldwide and was a critical darling. Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for it. The movie also won Best Picture, and Dev Patel pretty much owes his career to the movie.
In the interview, Boyle claimed that Slumdog Millionaire would not get made today, but not for the reasons you think:
“We wouldn’t be able to make that now. And that’s how it should be. It’s time to reflect on all that. We have to look at the cultural baggage we carry and the mark that we’ve left on the world…
At the time it felt radical. We made the decision that only a handful of us would go to Mumbai. We’d work with a big Indian crew and try to make a film within the culture. But you’re still an outsider. It’s still a flawed method.
That kind of cultural appropriation might be sanctioned at certain times. But at other times it cannot be. I mean, I’m proud of the film, but you wouldn’t even contemplate doing something like that today. It wouldn’t even get financed. Even if I was involved, I’d be looking for a young Indian filmmaker to shoot it.”
To make a movie that brought Indian culture, good and bad, to a higher profile than it had probably ever been across the West, doing for India what Crocodile Dundee did to Australia in the 80s, would be “cultural appropriation” and a bad thing unless made by an Indian filmmaker?
Danny, the reason Slumdog Millionaire wouldn’t get made today is because there is simply no space for that kind of movie in the modern theatrical release landscape anymore. If it did get made, it would be a streaming giant behind it, and a limited theatrical release would happen just to get it into awards contention.
In the past week, I caught the final 2/3rd of Austin Powers: Goldmember on television and thought “They wouldn’t make this movie today!” for entirely different reasons – mainly Hollywood cowardice!
“Cultural appropriation” is a lazy argument made by people who have already lost the plot and haven’t thought through the end consequences of what they are expousing.
