An Out-of-Character Role for Subtitles

Rejoice -- subtitles have been freed! For decades, they have been plain white lines of text tethered to the bottom of the screen in foreign films. But now, in the film "Slumdog Millionaire," the subtitles bounce around the screen in a rainbow of colors. They're stylish and splashy and original. They're liberated.

The first third of "Slumdog Millionaire," which opened Wednesday, is in Hindi with subtitles. The film is about an 18-year-old orphan in Mumbai named Jamal who goes on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" for a shot at 20 million rupees. As he moves through the trivia questions, we see his life in flashbacks -- from the murder of his mother to conning tourists at the Taj Mahal to falling in love.

Three actors play Jamal at different ages. The film was supposed to be all in English until British director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "28 Days Later") got to Mumbai and realized that the youngest Jamal, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, could act only in Hindi; in English, Khedekar and the other young actors were stiff. When Boyle gave them permission to act in Hindi, "it came alive."

"I rang up Warner Independent and said, 'Yeah, the first third is going to be in Hindi!' " Boyle recalled in an interview two weeks ago at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown. "And I remember the pause on the line. You could tell they thought I'd gone upriver and was going to come back with a movie about yoga or something."

He assured the Hollywood executives that he hadn't lost his mind, and he made them a promise: that the film would be even more exciting because of the subtitles. (Warner Independent Pictures has since gone out of business; Fox Searchlight Pictures is distributing the film.)

To make good on his word, he came up with the idea to have the subtitles look more like the dialogue in comic books, which float depending on where the characters are positioned.

"It's so cheap to do laser printing at the bottom of the screen," he said. "But you don't watch the film -- you read the film and you scan occasionally to the actors."

Boyle had seen nontraditional subtitles before in the 2004 Russian sci-fi film "Night Watch," by Timur Bekmambetov. The subtitles turned red, dripped like blood, vaporized and jumped across the screen.

To ensure that "Slumdog's" subtitles stayed legible against all backgrounds, Boyle (and London-based title designer Matthew Curtis, who says the project was "a joy to do") attached the text to bright banners of color. In one scene set in an outhouse, green and amber-backed subtitles bring jewel tones to an otherwise brown-toned shot.

"It was lovely to introduce color," he said. "It gives it a little spark. I wasn't lying when I said to Warner's it will be even more exciting with subtitles."