Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar Celebration on EW!
Buy the current issue of Entertainment Weekly HERE!
The cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire have been on a long, extraordinary journey- not to mention the miles they logged walking back and forth to the stage on Oscar night, reports EW.
This week’s Entertainment Weekly has their personal stories, plus an inside peek at the evening’s fashions, the parties, and all the backstage fun.
Director Danny Boyle is a master at amping up suspense, and on the red carpet at the 81st annual Academy Awards, he was doing his best to inject maximum drama into the evening’s proceedings. “No one knows anything, really,” Boyle said. “We’ll see. It’s a cliff hanger!”
By the time the final curtain fell on the Oscar ceremony some four hours later, the brightly colored fable about a plucky orphan from the slums of Mumbai racked up eight statuettes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Song for its closing number, “Jai Ho.” Even Harvey Weinstein, who had his own Best Picture candidate, had to acknowledge that Slumdog, for all its exotic flavor, managed to tap into Americans’ deep longing for a sense of uplift in troubled times. “When you study what Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his first 100 days, he inspired the country, and I think that’s the appeal of Slumdog Millionaire,” Weinstein said before the ceremony. “It’s very appropriate.”
For the giddy young stars of Slumdog, who’d made the longest and strangest trip to the Kodak Theatre, the Oscars were the surreal climax of an improbable ride that began on the dusty streets of Mumbai. Late that night at the Fox Searchlight party, amid all the glittering celebrities, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubina Ali, who portrayed the youngest versions of Salim and Latika, sat transfixed playing BrickBreaker on someone’s BlackBerry, even as blond women fawned over them and snapped pictures. The next day, they and some of the film’s other young cast members wouldn’t be taking meetings with high-powered studio executives and directors. They were going to Disneyland.
Anil Kapoor, who was already a megastar in India before he was persuaded to play Slumdog’s villainous game-show host by his son, says “I have been in films as a leading man for the last 25 years. I’d done over 100 films as a hero. My son said, ‘Dad, enough of playing a good man – you have to do this.’ I started shooting, and I changed as a human being. I am from a very simple background, almost like from the slums. Now, what a special time. It’s magic.”
The leading man, Dev Patel, was recommended by Danny Boyle’s daughter who saw him on the naughty British drama Skins. “I was a 17-year-old kid. I didn’t really know where I was going to end up,” he says. “And this film sort of fell in my lap. It feels like destiny in a way. Even now, the film winning the Oscar is very surreal. The character’s given me so much, not only as an actor but as a person. I remember when production began, I was a ball of nerves, didn’t really know how to work in front of a camera or how to express myself. I was a lot more introverted. And Danny Boyle came along – and this incredible city, which taught me about being an optimist. I feel I can hold my head up high now. I feel like I matured five years in the space of five months. I’m 18 and I was at the Oscars yesterday!”
Freida Pinto was a 24-year-old model and TV host who had never scored an acting role before Slumdog. “I was struggling,” she said. “I was presenting this travel show. I was coming to the end of it and had enjoyed the nine months of traveling. I was like, Oh, now my life’s over. I’m not going to have anything interesting to do. I was frustrated that I hadn’t found the right project. But now I think that the fruit of the struggle ends up being the sweetest taste possible. I mean, this is strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, bananas – the sweetest fruits in the world put together. It changed my life. It made me grow. It’s made me equipped to brave challenges in the future. You can’t predict the future, but I do have this optimism and this hope that if I just continue dreaming and continue working the same way, then I’ll be unstoppable.”
Source: EW
