In an interview by Tasha Robinson, Danny Boyle is asked if it was difficult to get permissions while filming Slumdog Millionaire in India. Boyle replies:
There’s lots of things that can be solved with cash. [Snickers.] And there’s occasional things that can’t be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there’s no distinction between the two. There’s no way of reading a situation and saying, “Yes, that’ll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we’ll be able to buy off.” It just depends on the day, apparently. The most extraordinary thing, you’d be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn’t be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what’s thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you. You have to remain optimistic, and that’s clearly how people live their lives there. Against all the odds, they retain kind of a spirit which allows them to get through against insufferable odds. The poverty, the traffic, the lack of infrastructure, the flooding during the monsoons—there’s just so many things that are coming at you at the whole time that your spirit has to remain, and that’s certainly true.
“The poverty, the traffic, the lack of infrastructure, the flooding during the monsoons”—and the bureaucracy: Are the first four made worse by the fifth, you think? If we’re reconciled to that, are we not then automatically reconciled to the rest?
(Link via email from Arun Simha.)