ComingSoon.net just spent some time talking to director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy about their rags to riches love story Slumdog Millionaire, which is the toast of this year’s Toronto Film Festival.
When asked what he might do next, Boyle was slightly tentative because he’s not sure whether it would happen or not, but he hopes to reunite with his “Millions” screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce in doing an animated movie based on Terry Pratchett’s children book “Truckers”, which is the first part of his “Bromeliad trilogy.”
The books are about a race of tiny people from another world called Nomes, living and trying to survive among humans, who discover their secret history, which prompts them to try to return home.
If the project does get rolling at DreamWorks as planned, it would be an interesting new challenge for the filmmaker coming off of his ambitious Bombay-based epic, but Boyle realizes how complicated doing an animated film would be, which would be one of the deciding factors in whether he does it or not.
“It’s a weird different discipline, it’s very strange,” he admitted to us during our interview earlier. “You’re more like a ringmaster, kind of organizing this huge army of illustrators who can change the movie. It’s really weird. They often do scripts and they have no gags in them at all, but then you see the finished film and it’s full of funny gags, and they say that it’s not in the script, that all comes through the process of the animators. It’s like learning the skill of letting certain ones of them off their leash to do the gags.”
Slumdog Millionaire is scheduled to open in select cities on November 28, and you can look for our full interview with Boyle and Beaufoy closer to the release as well as a lot more about the movie.
