Simon Beaufoy

Simon Beaufoy is the writer of the multiple-oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and The Full Monty, as well as other films including Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Among Giants, and This Is Not A Love Song.

He was interviewed for the Story Engine Screen Writing Conference, held in Darlington in March 2009.

How did you start writing?

I came from a documentary background. I went to Bournemouth Film School and trained as a documentary director and had a very brief career doing that. I was trying to make a film about the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team and spent a lot of the BBC's money and didn't shoot a frame of film. And they were very nice about it, said "Oh it's not your fault. You go home and we'll ring you with your next job." And four months later: not a word.

So the documentary that I was about to make, which was about electricity pylon painters on the moors, I just thought: Well it's clearly not going to happen as a documentary so I'll turn it into a drama. And that's how I started writing.

So you wrote Among Giants.

Yeah. It did the rounds of everyone. It was one of those first screenplays that one writes. A hundred and sixty pages, which is at least sixty pages too long. And it was very rough and ready. But it had something in it that appealed to the producer of The Full Monty, an Italian guy who was very puzzled by English men. He said "In Italy no men take their clothes off for money. What's wrong with you English men?" I said "Well there's a kind of weird disenfranchisement thing going on in this country at the moment." And he read Among Giants, and not dissimilar themes of masculinity are sort of discussed in that. And so he persuaded me to write The Fully Monty.

Which is quite a political film as well.

I find it hard to write anything that isn't political with at least a small 'p'. I think the secret combination, which is so difficult to get right, is to entertain and sneak various messages in as a kind of Trojan horse. So you dress the film up as the feelgood movie of the decade or whatever they're calling it, and actually it's about working class Sheffield, the men there and their lack of dignity and their loss of jobs and self respect and the total disenfranchisement of that community.

It's not that funny actually. It's really got a very sad underbelly to it. And that's always what I was trying to do. I always think it's only as funny as it is because it's as sad as it is. And I think you need both poles to be working really well, to make that switch between funny and serious work. You need to kind of extend yourself at both ends.

I always try to come from a serious place and make people laugh at it as well. It's a Northern thing, isn't it - the funniest jokes I've heard are from people in the worst situations. And that's sort of where my heart is, in that particular place where the worse things are the funnier they get.

How much do you think that a sense of place is one of the starting points for a film?

Place is very important to me. It's like one of the characters. I find it very hard to write about people in "a town." I read lots of people's scripts and do various film teaching courses and if it says "A town in England," or "Somewhere in the North," I go "That person's not been there. They don't know anything." If you say Glusburn near Keighley, Yorkshire, I go okay, I get it. I buy that you're telling me a true story.

Place is really evocative to me cos everybody's personalities are born out of where they were brought up, I think. Mine certainly was. In Among Giants the industrial architecture of Sheffield (which is now all gone of course) was a big part of the film. Same with Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire. It's the city that informs the energy of those people. It's a virtuous circle of the city making the people, of the people making the city. And I couldn't have written Slumdog Millionaire for any other city in the world really. It wouldn't have had the same feel. And who knows why that is? But if it had been Shanghai or London or New York it wouldn't have been the same, wouldn't have had that slightly naïve generosity which comes straight from that city. And I only got that from staying there for month after month and just feeling it and going what a weird place this is. It's cruel, it's brutal, it's incredibly warm, it's incredibly generous and it's kind of naïvely romantic, as well as being the grottiest, grubbiest, most violent place I've ever been. But what made that film is being in that city. So place is absolutely key.

I always start from character, partly because of my documentary roots. It's the people that interest me first, then the place, then the story. And they obviously all intertwine, but the place is key to everything I do really.

How do you deal with research?

If you're going to write about a foreign culture and a foreign land you have to do it with not just a great deal of respect, you have to do it from where they're coming from. I don't want to be the white man with a pith helmet who parachutes into Bombay going "Right, line up slum kids. Here we go. Little bit of a film about you chaps." You just can't do that. So I went round the slums of Mumbai for weeks talking to people and listening and finding out.

And an old documentary question that I was taught which has been the most helpful thing I've ever learnt was to ask people: If you had a camera what would you make a film about? And you get very interesting answers back. Jamal's backstory isn't from the novel but from stories that people told me in the slums. I don't feel I had the right to impose my view on them. The story's much more interesting cos it's told from their perspective. I shaped it and formed it, sure, but as they told me what was going on in their lives, that forms an authenticity that for me is key. If you've got that to start with, you can go anywhere. You can go to fairytales, comedy, it doesn't really matter. But you have to start from an authentic place.

How long did you spend in Mumbai?

I did lots of two, three week trips, travelling round various slums, nearly all the slums really, to get a feel of the place over a period of about a year. And I went back with Danny to show him all the locations. Cos a lot of the locations in the film – again it's this thing about place. That whole toilet sequence with those big piers that stick out over the rubbish dump, they really do look out over the airfield. I came across those quite by accident. I just thought those were fantastic. See, in reality they've only got three sides. The fourth wall of the toilet looks out over the airfield. So you sort of sit there in the morning and get a grandstand view of all India's most famous film stars flying in on their private jets and I just thought that was such a brilliant image of those two worlds that I had to squeeze it into the film somehow.

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