Profiles

Simon Beaufoy's most recent film Slumdog Millionaire has brought him a hat trick of awards - a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and, most recently, the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Now he is so keen to share his success, he's brought the Academy Award (more usually known as an Oscar) back to show to people here in West Yorkshire. He says: "What's lovely about the film is that it's really brought out the generosity in people. Everyone has been so nice about the success of the film, about me winning the statue. It's been so nice. It really has. I went back to the folks, they live in Crosshills, and their mantelpiece is just full of congratulations cards on my behalf. So sweet..."

But, although his latest film is set in Mumbai and the awards he's collected show there's wide appreciation for his work, he agrees that much of his work is rooted right here in Yorkshire: "Yes. Well, I was born and brought up here. The place has had a very strong imprint on my imagination really and you can make all sorts of films in one county. Anything from really urban films - a film like Full Monty to films really about the rural community like The Darkest Light. It spans every genre, this county. There's incredible possibilities for filmmaking here. I've always thought that."

Simon brings his Oscar home...

His filmwriting debut, The Full Monty, a low budget comedy about unemployed Sheffield steel workers, turned out to be the most profitable British film ever and earned Simon an Oscar nomination. The film that followed - Blow Dry, a story about a hair salon - was shot around Bradford and Keighley but things didn't work out: "I'd forgotten all about that. I was fired from that film." The success of The Full Monty had attracted the attention of the Hollywood money men: "The studio system thought they could smell money and, instead of making a little low budget film like The Full Monty, they threw big money at it, they threw Americans at it who were trying to do Yorkshire accents. It's just the opposite of everything The Full Monty was which was done with a grain of integrity and a love of the place and the people. It felt very authentic and that was really important to me. There was nothing authentic about Blow Dry. It felt a bit of a fake - fake Yorkshire really - which I didn't really like."

Yasmin, screened on Channel 4 in 2005, was also filmed in Keighley. It's the story of a young Muslim woman who finds herself the victim of prejudice following the events of 9/11. Simon says: "We looked all over the mill towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire and, I don't know, we just came back to Keighley really as a perfect place to shoot in. I don't know what it is about Yorkshire. It's interested me all my life. It's full of contradictions and it's just a place that's fascinated me."

His Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup, is set in Mumbai. But was this a problem for a writer seeking authenticity? Simon says it was a very different film: "I suppose what really freed me up was the sense that Slumdog Millionaire was an opera more than anything else so I didn't particularly need to know how these people spoke although I did spend a lot of time studying them. Because it belonged in a slightly hyper-real world they could speak more the way I felt they should speak, rather than in the authentic language of that place. That sort of frees me up. I thought if I'm going to write opera, the absolute authenticity of the piece which you get in something like Yasmin, it's a different thing. I don't need that absolute authenticity. I need something else which is big and operatic and bold. That took the place of the authenticity."

So what's next? Simon is not too sure: "I've got a couple of films waiting in limbo for directors trying to find money in the middle of a credit crunch. No matter how many Oscars you win it's never easy getting your film off the ground so we're back on the treadmill. Same old looking for directors, looking for money, as it ever was"

Despite the never-ending struggle to get films made, Simon says he doesn't want to be anything other than a writer: "I think that's what I'm good at and I should stick to what I'm good at."

Simon Beaufoy took part in a Screentalk at the Bradford International Film Festival on March 24th, 2009. He is also a Patron of the Festival.