A motorway underpass in Mumbai. It’s late November, 2007, and the director Danny Boyle, with his cast and crew in tow, arrive in the morning hours to shoot a pivotal sequence for his new movie Slumdog Millionaire. The film, a dizzy busy whirlwind tour of poverty, crime and hard-knock love in contemporary India, is seen through the eyes of a former street-urchin, Jamal (Dev Patel). Sitting on the hot-seat during a miraculous game of India’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Jamal remembers his childhood years, including those spent as a beggar, gathered and organised under the aforementioned motorway.

For Boyle, the 49-year-old director of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, this is a scene and a key location. He’s been here twice before, and even came yesterday, to do a final check. Today, however, there’s just appears to be one tiny snag. Mumbai City Council, over night, have built a 12ft (3.7m) wall, 100m long, through the middle of the location.

“My first thought was: ‘That’s just not possible, is it? To build a wall that big in 24 hours?’ ” says Boyle today, in the library room of a Covent Garden hotel, barely able to contain his mirth at moments that were harrowing at the time. “Then you say: ‘Why didn’t we know about this? Why didn’t anyone tell us? We can’t do any of the shots! We’re not f***ing getting anything done today.’ ” Boyle chuckles as he says this.

He is in faded denims and a white T-shirt, and as he speaks he glows, with the mien of someone remembering a particularly good party. “But then what happens is that you give up any idea of trying to control the situation, and you just go with it. You get your shots, but it’s not about control, it’s about reacting to what’s in front of you. And if you go with it and trust it, you’ll get back a freewheeling spirit. That, I hope, is in the movie.”

The freewheeling spirit, and then some, is what defines Slumdog Millionaire. Written by the Full Monty scribe Simon Beaufoy, and based on a bestselling novel, it has, in Boyle’s hands become a thing of hyperkinetic beauty. Here, as cameras spin down the slum-streets of Mumbai, and then around the Taj Mahal, and later through the mansions of the country’s new ultra-riche establishment, a story unfolds about the simple unswerving love that Jamal holds for his childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto), and how it drives him through the ache and hardships of an emerging powerhouse India, right into a tear-jerking finale that will leave only the hardest hearts unmoved. It is, undoubtedly, Boyle’s most inventive crowd-pleaser since Trainspotting.

And yet, says Boyle, he was initially a reluctant director. “When I heard about it I thought: ‘I’m addicted to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? like everyone else, but I don’t want to make a film about a quiz show,’ ” Beaufoy’s richly textured script, however, changed his mind, as did the fact that he’d just spent three painstaking years making a sci-fi movie called Sunshine that very few people went to see. “Making Sunshine was all about having complete control,” he says, before dropping his head into his hands. “But then it opens and, f***ing hell, it was a terrible weekend!”

He thus repeats that his attraction to Slumdog Millionaire was the complete lack of control it offered him, and the challenge of making it up on the fly. “Certainly, I feel that the temperature of the film is appropriate to my reaction to the place, which is that I loved it desperately. And loved the people.”

He adds that he was wowed too by the country’s open approach to spirituality, and how the people seemed to see spiritual influences in all aspects of life. He says that he found it inspiring, and that he is, “more and more spiritually inclined these days.”

And true, if you look at Boyle’s best work to date, there seems to be something transcendent trying to escape. Whether it’s Ewan McGregor’s overdose scene in Trainspotting, the ghostly maternal apparition in the kids flick Millions, or the climax of Sunshine, where Cillian Murphy’s astrophysicist stretches his hand out to stroke the surface of the sun, there’s a sense that Boyle is wrestling with ineffable metaphysical questions amid all the colours, the pace and the pop bravado.

“Well, I was going to be a priest until I was 13,” he says, describing how his Manchester-raised Irish-Catholic family, including twin sister Maria and younger sister Bernadette, had high hopes for the only male heir, who was booked into a Wigan seminary until wiser heads prevailed. “A priest in school saw something different in me, and told my mother that I should wait until I was 18.” In the meantime, of course, Boyle had discovered another church – the ABC Cinema in Hulme.

Naturally, the mini-priest in Boyle was gradually replaced by the aesthete, and he skipped from a drama degree at the University of Wales to the now defunct Joint Stock Theatre Company to the role of artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre. It was at the latter institution, he says, that he developed his slightly off-kilter sensibility, together with a respect for good writing, after directing plays from iconoclasts such as Sarah Kane and Robert Brenton. He segued into television and in the mid1990s was brought a dark screwball script about some devious flatmates and a bag of stolen cash, called Shallow Grave. The rest was Britflick history.

So, would it be fair to assume, with his renewed and reinvigorated sense of spirituality that Danny Boyle is finally doing, and doing well, what he was put on this earth to do? “No!” he shrinks back at the very thought. “I don’t think this is my destiny at all. I’d love to do something genuinely constructive. I really should give it all up and become a teacher. That’s a proper job.”

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