Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar Winner Chris Dickens

By Scott Essman

“Brilliant – it’s everything you can ever wish for and imagine,” editor Chris Dickens described of his Oscar-winning experience for Slumdog Millionaire. “It’s not something you think about every day when you are editing the film.”

As Dickens had never before worked with director Danny Boyle, a smooth experience was all that the editor wished for at first. “He had seen [my work in] Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead,” Dickens said of eclectic director Boyle. “I imagine that he looked for something quite pacey like those. He offered me the job immediately. When you first start working with someone new, you have to get used to it. I worked a lot harder at the beginning as I wanted him to think the best of me. You want to put your best foot forward.”

Dickens spent nearly 11 months on the project. First, for ultimate verisimilitude, to create Slumdog Millionaire on actual locations, the company left for India to start filming October 2007 for four months. At the tail end, the film was first screened in September 2008 at the festival in Telluride, but the film hadn’t yet been finished grading at that point.

During the Mumbai (Bombay), India shoot, Boyle was not in the editing room that much, but he was watching cut sequences every day. “He would want to see sequences all the time to see if he needed to shoot anymore,” Dickens explained. “He often revised some sequences. Later on when we got to the director’s cut, what he would do is screen the film once or twice a week and make notes and talk it through. He’d leave me for a couple of days to do that. These were broad strokes to try all the options. We didn’t do that much fine cutting in the process as we were going along.”

Once Dickens would go back to fine cut, Boyle and he would screen the film with the writer and producer as well. “We would discuss things, and it was a quite a group effort,” said Dickens. “I think the main thing for me was actually being in Bombay during the shoot and being involved in it and getting to know the people there.”

As Boyle brought a select few people from England to India, there were cultural adjustments. “You had to get to know how things worked there and the way that dailies were and how the people operate,” Dickens stated. “The English are a little bit reserved, but Indian people are much more direct — I had to adjust.”

Another point of cultural difference was the pace of operations in India. “We expect things to happen in a certain timetable as in Europe or London, but they don’t happen like that there,” Dickens remarked. “We were using quite a lot of new technology. We had quite a lot of learning to do via the digital cameras we were using, and getting the workflow that suited us.”

After principal photography, Dickens relied on the script as his bible even though he had some flexibility. “The script was very good and locked down in most places, but there were a lot of options,” he said. “I needed to edit all the sequences, and get familiar with everything he shot. If we wanted to re-order it, I knew what we had – like a kit of parts. I knew what we had to call on to make things work. I suppose it was a little more free than what we would expect. Your script is your guiding light – your bible: if it works well, and if not, you start adjusting everything to make it all work.”

Throughout the process, Boyle gave Dickens due latitude. “He said to do what I think,” Dickens said. “You pull it apart, and then start fine cutting it. One of the big challenges was that my first cut was about three-and-a-half hours. On the page, the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show didn’t occupy much space, but in the show, it occupied a lot.”

To keep the story flowing into and out of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show and the main character’s past memories was a key challenge in both the writing and the editing of the film. “We had memories coming in and out at times, overlapping the different sequences and different parts of the story, making them feel like one,” he detailed. “That was the real battle in the edit. We were doing that all the time, but it literally came together in the last two-three weeks. We cut a few parts of the story that had always been in but we had never thought about chopping them. We cut a [Millionaire] question and answer. We took liberties with the show.”

One storyline that was removed from the film involved a key element, with one part finally left in due to dramatic necessity. “At the end of the film, he sat by a statue and that statue was the answer to one of the questions,” Dickens revealed. “The train station was a recurring place in his memory. We planted that earlier in the film, but it didn’t quite work. It was confusing, but in taking that out and that question out, we simplified it early on. We ended up with 30 minutes of [such] additional scenes which will be DVD extras. With this particular film it is interesting what got cut and what stayed in. You make those decisions at the time, and the film felt right at the length it is – you have to be hard on yourself and make those hard decisions.”

In retrospect, Dickens noted his love for the script and his ability as an editor to bring many ideas to the finished film, though his task was daunting. “Danny shoots a lot – always interesting ideas that he was trying,” Dickens commented. “He is always very amenable and pretty open to work with. He seems to have a knack for getting the best work out of you. He’s not pushing you all the time; he is nurturing and pulling the best work out of me. At the end, I felt like I really contributed a lot to the film as opposed to being dictated to.”

Freelance writer and video producer Scott Essman’s books and DVDs about special effects in Hollywood motion pictures are all available under his name at Amazon.com. Since the mid-1980s, Scott has been writing and producing projects about motion picture craftsmanship. He has published over 350 articles as a freelancer and has produced over twenty publicity projects for Universal Studios Home Entertainment where he made video documentaries and wrote publicity materials. He published his first book, “Freelance Writing for Hollywood,” for Michael Wiese in 2000, and has a book about Tim Burton due in 2009.

Featured in StudentFilmmakers Magazine, April 2009 Edition.