Adaptation

Question: A man with an expensive set of public-school A-levels and an English degree from Oxford sits down in a barge moored on the Thames at Walthamstow. He writes a screenplay. And it tears the beating heart out of India's slums and presents it to the world, bleak and funny and moving all at once. How did it happen? How did Simon Beaufoy come to write Slumdog Millionaire?

The answer to this question is worth $377 million. Because, wonderfully, dangerously, creativity is no longer some obscure and private process that goes on in the back of the writers head- it's big business. "When budgets of tens of millions depend on your screenwriter," says Beaufoy, "his creative process has to be as accountable and dependable as the hand of your grip or the touch of your animator." So Beaufoy cannot afford to go off to some windswept mountain cabin and come down three years later clutching a scri pt in triumph: he has to turn books into films like a pulping factory turns wood into paper. Creativity as industry.

The raw material is Q&A, a novel by an Indian diplomat called Vikas Swarup. It is, more or less, the same story as the film's: a dust-poor chai-wallah from the feral slums of Mumbai flukes his way through 12 questions on the Indian version of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?', and is arrested by the police for cheating. The 12 answers to these questions turn into the biography of modern India, told through the life of one of her lowliest sons.

So Simon Beaufoy sits there on his barge, and turns the pages, and wonders, how do I make this live? The first stage is to recreate the book, to take it right back to the first inspiration that drove its author to write and delete and lose pages under the bed and rewrite them and wrangle with editors for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Beaufoy had to live the book for himself. "I've never written a scri pt," he says, "without visiting the location and spending a lot of time there. The peak of writing a scri pt - for me, anyway - is to make sure that the place and the people are.real. I spent a lot of time in the Juhu slum talking to people, and really getting their stories rather than making it up myself. Their experiences of living in the place were always more interesting than anything I could come up with."

Then Beaufoy returns to his barge in Walthamstow with the heart and mind of an Indian screenwriter. In many ways, the scri pt he ends up writing is more Indian than the Indian book. He invents a Bollywood love interest, the beautiful orphan Latika, and imbues the whole film with the kind of driving destiny that India loves to project to the outside world. Where a writer with Beaufoy's social realist background (he wrote The Full Monty back in 1998, as well as the bleaker Among Giants and Yasmin) might have fought the Bollywood plot, the new Beaufoy embraces it. "It's a Bollywood movie," he snorts. "You have to have a kiss at the end. You want one of them [Jamal and Latika] to get run over by a train? No, it had to happen the way it did. It would have killed me if it wasn't that way."

This is how a perfect adaptation works. The best ideas, best stories, have a certain power behind them that inspires the original writer and the adaptor alike. Beaufoy was not adapting Q&A so much as the dream behind it, the great Indian dream of rising from the time-stricken anonymity of the gutters, through adventure and adversity and brotherly love, to untold wealth and a perfect kiss at the end. With a brilliant adaptation, it doesn't matter whether the novel or the film was written first: both draw their energy, their inner divinity, from the same streets, the same life, the same poem in which Slumdog Millionaire is merely the latest episode.