SLUMDOG Millionaire is in the running for four Golden Globes and is tipped for Oscar nominations too, and yet Danny Boyle might never have made the film.

“They sent the script and my agent said it was a script about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and I genuinely didn’t want to make a film about that, but then I saw who had written it: Simon Beaufoy… The Full Monty.”

Danny read the first 15 pages and was hooked. Slumdog Millionaire, and its story of a Mumbai street kid facing the 20 million rupee final question on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, would become the Lancastrian director’s seventh film.

An exploratory trip to India further whetted his appetite for making a movie amid the chaos of a city where more than 1,000 movies are filmed every year.

The Bollywood-inspired Slumdog Millionaire could not have been more different from Boyle’s last film, the 2007 space adventure Sunshine, both in subject matter and in the demands of the shoot.

“It certainly felt like a chance to do something so different and there isn’t a bigger contrast from outer space than Mumbai,” says Danny, 52.

“Space movies are all about control and directing really, but in India, you can’t. You’d just waste your budget trying to control anything.”

He had expected a residue of past colonial times in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was. “But that has largely gone,” he says. “There’s an incredibly generous spirit. You can’t control or predict anything; you just have to go with it and it will give you the film in the end.”

Danny welcomed the challenges of working in India.

“I loved it. If you go with the right attitude, it’s an incredible experience,” he says. “It just changes you forever. You learn a lot about yourself. You’re just learning the whole time. I find it an extraordinary place.

“All life is there in all its beauty and ugliness. There are such extremes – of wealth, poverty, happiness, sadness, horror, extraordinary redemptive things – and they don’t separate them. As a place to tell a story and drive a story through, it’s fantastic.”

Directing there presented myriad challenges, not least in the casting.

“In India, every actor is working on at least six films at any one time, and they’ll tell you when they’re available, and so the first assistant director is juggling mobile phones, juggling who’s available when – and you can’t bang tables, you have to go with the flow,” says Danny.

While he had wanted to cast the film entirely in Mumbai, he soon found that the local actors lacked the qualities he was seeking for the lead role of call-centre tea boy Jamal Malik.

“We just couldn’t find anybody,” Danny says. “The guys we were seeing didn’t have that feel of being a loser. The fashion in Bollywood for the young guys, if you want to be an actor, is to get in the gym six hours a day. I didn’t want anybody like that because Jamal’s an underdog and you want him to feel like an ordinary guy.”

Danny settled on casting Skins actor Dev Patel to play his 18-year-old leading man. Even that caused a few headaches.

“Initially, he kept turning up with his mum. This was a big problem for me, because we did four or five different auditions, and each time, his mum came,” Danny says. “She’s a very nice woman but I thought, ‘I’ll have to get rid of her’. He couldn’t say anything because it’s his mum. He looked to me really so I had to separate him from his mum.

“But I could see he was quite determined and he’s tough, really. We’d argue, disagree about certain things. You’d want your lead actor to take responsibility for the film and for his character. And he had this idea about his character, and he was right in the way he did it.”

Danny was so infused with the spirit of Mumbai while filming that he could not resist incorporating Bollywood dancing in the closing-credits sequence, filmed over three nights at Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus at the only time available, the two hours between 2am and 4am.

“You can’t live and work in Mumbai and Delhi and not dance. It’s so natural,” says Danny.

“Certain things express the country, and in India, it’s song and dance in movies and in life. In Bollywood films, it tends to represent love and happiness.”

It may not look it on screen, but Anglo-Asian Dev Patel did not find the dancing easy. “It was tough for Dev, who said he felt he was like he was in his pyjamas, this boy from Harrow, so we told him to imagine he was bouncing basketballs,” says Danny.

That memory brings another smile to the director’s face. Indeed he so enjoyed his Indian experience, he hopes to return to Mumbai. “I’m a complete devotee of it now. I could easily make another film there, I’d love to go back. It has enormous heart, you know,” he says.

What film might emerge next time?

“It’s a dream to do a musical because it’s the most difficult thing to do in the world, so it was great to have had that end sequence this time. We thought about putting the dancing elsewhere but it had to be at the end… and I do love music, I really do,” says Danny.